


Pari Siamo

by gracianasi



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: AU, Cold War, F/M, Slow Burn, Stalking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-04-28 11:16:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14448135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracianasi/pseuds/gracianasi
Summary: Three months after her escape from the Phantom's lair, a new, sinister threat forces Christine back into his orbit. Cold War AU.





	1. Tremolando

The first day was spent shivering in the smallest bedroom of a manor house near Yvelines. The first day, and the next and the next for thirty-two consecutive days. The thirty-third day saw the bright interior of a Citroën, briefly, and then a mausoleum, and then a cramped sitting-room with a barre tucked discreetly along the far wall.

A change of scenery on the seventieth day: a flat on the rue de la Mare, smaller than the smallest bedroom of a manor house near Yvelines. 

That first day, and all the following days, the sun had mounted the sky and chased off the moon-shadows and it was then, when the sun was in view, that the forgetting was easier.

* * *

 

_April 1964_

They had not found him. 

They had not found him, but damn it all, he had left the mask behind, in some histrionic lapse in judgment which he now greatly regretted. The labyrinthine tunnels beneath the Palais Garnier extended only so far before they met with the wider sewage network - he would have to ascend, and soon - and even if they thought him dead, his flight was not in vain; there was little hope of laying low sans mask. He must get as far as possible, as quickly as possible, and no one knew this tunnels better than he. His hat, his coat: both abandoned, foolishly, and here he was, clad in evening wear no longer impeccable, coated as it was in silt and sewer-grime. He gave a wild laugh, and it echoed, trapped by the stone of walls and ceiling, a fading cacophony of hysteria. _How mad he must look! How demonic -_

No, that wasn’t right. He was no demon; she had made it so. Not a phantom, not an angel, nor a lucifer - but a man. 

Yes, she had made it so. With fear and mercy and crush of lips she had exorcised him, drawn him from himself until a new, quivering thing lived where once there had only been death.

A ladder, up ahead. A sewer grate above it. He was not sure how long or how far he had been running, but instinct told him to grab hold of the rusted bars and haul himself up. What little he could see through the metal lattice assured him that he would, at least, be under cover of darkness.

The grate slid aside with some effort and he pushed himself up through the hole, emerging onto a deserted street, hazy in the light of the street lamps. He did not recognize the buildings, but then again, it had been years since he had last properly surfaced from the bowels of the opera house, mausoleums and rooftops notwithstanding. He knew the city better than most - he could thank his eidetic memory for that - and, sure enough, crossing the length of the street, he knew a spark of memory at the name on the sign: rue de Provence. At this junction it intersected with the rue Taitbout, but he recalled distantly that the next perpendicular street over was Saint-Georges, and a plan began to coalesce. 

He moved down the rue Saint-Georges, one block, then two, relying more on feel than visual memory, and finally found his feet turning instinctively to the right. The brick facade of a subsidized apartment building stood before him, looming large in the darkness. Soft light shone from a sixth-story window, and he was certain that this was the right building. The outer door was easy enough to pick open, and he flew up five flights of stairs, emerging onto the sixth floor more winded than he should have been, given the years he’d spent scaling the scaffolds and arches of the opera house. Brushing his discomfort aside - it hardly registered against the anguish seeping further through his veins with every pulse of his calcified heart - his feet once again followed an obscurely familiar path and came to a stop outside a door, indistinguishable from the others but for the flare of memory it provoked. Bracing a hand on the lintel, he raised his other fist and pounded on the door. 

From within, an aborted curse and the clink of china. The shuffle of footsteps nearing. The door opened inward, infinitesimally, to reveal green eyes behind a pair of reading glasses.

“Oh, fuck,” came a voice, and the door opened wider to admit him. “So it is you. I should have known—"

“Not here,” he muttered, shouldering his way inside the apartment. The door clicked shut behind him and he paused to listen for movement back in the hallway. When he was confident that none of the neighbours had emerged, he turned to face the apartment’s occupant, a dark-skinned man, hair liberally shot through with grey. “I assume we may speak freely?” 

“The place isn’t bugged, if that’s what you’re insinuating,” the man said, frowning. He removed his glasses and polished them on his shirt, a nervous tic he had never managed to subdue. “I may be retired, but I’m not a fool.”

“Retired, old man?” he replied, derisive. “I never took you as one to abandon your noble duty.”

“And what would you know of duty, Erik?” the man said, and then he sighed tiredly and raised his glasses back to his face. “What are you doing here?”

 _Erik_. A name he hadn’t heard in so long. A simple arrangement of letters, a name, and yet, it rendered him breathless for a moment. “You must have heard—”  

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard all about the exploits of the Opera Ghost.” 

“Then,” he said, brushing aside his annoyance at the interruption, “you’ll know that—”

“That you killed two men and abducted a young singer? Yes, I do, and what was her name? Christine—”

A strangled scream tore from his throat and his lungs constricted and her face, her hair, her mouth, the feel of it on his, _twice_ - “Damn you,” he roared, forgetting himself, palm slamming into the wall beside his head. “Do not say her name!”    

The man just stared at him, with an expression of resigned chagrin, before he sighed again. “You know you can’t be here.”

“What will you do,” he snarled, raking a hand through his hair, feeling another mad laugh swirling in his gut, “bring me in? Me, your only friend? Or have you forgotten, Samir, what I have done, what I have _risked_ , for you?” 

“Is that what you are?” he asked quietly. “A friend?” 

His chest heaved, and he became aware that he had come to Samir barefaced - he raised his shaking hand to cover the twisted flesh and worked to modulate his breathing. “Please,” he said, “all I ask is that you assist me in finding a place to hide, and that you tell no one of my location. You will never hear from me again, if you wish it.”

The man’s face seemed to crumple, minutely, and he said, “You are aware of the repercussions I would face were my superiors to discover that I had let you slip from my grasp once again.”

“So you are not retired,” he said, grimly triumphant. “I knew it—”

“One never fully retires from the Service, you imbecile,” Samir said, without heat. Sweeping his doleful gaze over him, he seemed to straighten his shoulders before beckoning him farther into the apartment. “You didn’t happen to bring a change of clothes, did you? You smell like a sewer.” 

* * *

 

_July 1964_

Paris in mid-July was all swelter and drizzle and spirit – Bastille Day had just passed, with a military parade and street-dancing and an ocean of Mousseux. A particularly hot day. She had thought, abstractly, of war, and then less abstractly of gunshots and catacombs and mobs, and then she had gone back to bed.

The ninety-seventh day began with a sunrise. She had risen early, startled awake by some nebulous dream that she had already begun to forget, tangled in sheets twisted and sticky with sweat. Frantic to be free of the stifling bedclothes, she’d kicked and tumbled her way off the bed and staggered to the window, pressing her forehead to it and smudging the glass before throwing it open. The pre-dawn air knifed through her lungs and she welcomed it and braced her palms on the windowsill and breathed deeply, waiting for the young morning light to saturate the night sky.

Being awake at this hour, on the threshold between night and day, felt somehow like trespassing. Felt heady, too, and sonorous; Paris in the key of B minor.

Fingers pressing into the windowsill, shoulders hunching against an unbidden surge of yearning, the first steps of a whole tone scale sounding discordant in her ears. A mask, a boat, a hand curled talon-like around her arm, dragging her down, a voice, a voice. His voice.

Never before had she dreaded nightfall, but now, after it all - she was supposed to be _free_ , now, but she wasn’t, she couldn’t be, not when he still haunted her dreams, the white flash of his mask and crook of his fingers beckoning. _Take her, forget me, forget all of this_ \- as though she could forget the sound and smell and feel of him, sharp and beguiling. The taste of him, something like misery, coated the back of her throat, and she breathed him. Raoul had not understood, when she had clutched at her throat those first few days, had held her and comforted her when she had thought she might die from it. Now night heralded long hours of aborted memory, fear, and confused longing. 

The sky had lightened and the stars had begun to fade. She was shivering. Prying stiff fingers from the windowsill, she moved back to the bed, straightening the sheets and replacing the pillow that had fallen to the floor. She slipped a dressing-gown over her shoulders and moved about the flat, setting the coffee pot on the stove, assembling what remained in the fridge into something that resembled breakfast. The wireless, tuned to France Inter, crackled when she switched it on - it was too early yet for the morning broadcast - so she sat and ate to the sound of air-wave static. 

In a few hours, Meg and Madame Giry would come to fetch her and they would board the metro at Ménilmontant, transfer at Père-Lachaise, and disembark at Opéra. Emerging from the underground into the bustle of the Place de l’Opéra, her eyes would catch on the elaborate facade of the Palais Garnier, the polychromic pastiche of columns and statuary and glinting gold. Her heart would stop, briefly, and then it would jolt and start anew, whether out of fear or desire she was never certain. To once again ascend the Grand Escalier, to giggle and dream in the wings with the ballet corps, to survey from the roof the vast length of the Avenue, the Louvre’s pyramids glinting at the street-end… 

Ninety-seven days and she had not returned. She would go as far as the Place de l’Opéra, Meg hugging her goodbye before hurrying across the street, and wander off down one of the side streets. She thought perhaps today she might visit the Beaujolais gallery.

She moved absently through her morning ablutions, lingering in the hot shower until the room crawled with steam, and when she returned to the kitchen to hear music playing softly on the wireless, she switched it off with a grimace and went to get dressed.

Ninety-seven days and she had not been able to endure the sound of music, either. Torturous, made worse by the melodies simmering mellifluous in her head, and oh, she hated him, then, and the fact that even now, the mere memory of him could seduce her mind. Of all his crimes, this injustice, this violation, was the worst. It felt like losing her father again.

_“I’m sorry,” Raoul gasped, as soon as they were out, “Christine, I’m sorry - you told me and told me and I didn’t believe you -” He clutched her tighter, the diaphanous material of her dress sliding beneath his fingers._

_“Raoul,” she could only say, for she had lost all other words. “Raoul.”_

_Huddled together on the rue Scribe side of the Palais, star-pricked night settled innocuously about them, it was impossible to imagine that mere minutes ago she had come close to -_

_To what? She could not put words to the feeling. The despair and misery and bitterness, yes, but the way his voice, even just the thought of him, touched her… like flying, electric and thrilling but foreboding all the same. Unfathomable and bewildering._

_The thought of Raoul, neck snapped, dead forever, made her feel faint. She brought trembling hands to his face and they clutched at each other, listening to the gradual slowing of their heartbeats. No sound came from within the Palais. Had the mob found him? Had they discovered his hiding place? Would he surrender, or would he fight? She could not be sure which alternative she found more alarming._

_“Christine,” Raoul was saying, “you’re trembling. I should - I should have brought you straight home.”_

_“No,” she said at once, burrowing tighter into him. His dress shirt was torn at the shoulder and his vest, smeared with grime, had lost its buttons, and still she pressed herself against his chest. “I can’t go. Not there.”_

_“All right,” he said, soothing. “All right, Little Lotte.”_

Today, in the sun and the crowd, in her polka dot shift dress and Mary Janes, she could pretend that she was a young tourist, and marvel at the architecture and the crêperies and the street artists. Ignore the pain and fear, push it back into the steadily growing penumbra of her mind where, during the day, she kept the memories locked away. 


	2. Bruscamente

Breakfast on the hundred-and-ninth day was decadent and expensive. It was a Sunday, so the opera house was dark, and Meg had wheedled and begged over the phone until she had given in. They met at Jourdain and took the metro together, a whole compartment all to themselves, save for a man in a tan suit, and walked the two blocks from the station to Lenôtre, a patisserie that would no doubt send Madame Giry into hysterics had she known.

“What’s the occasion?” she had asked, absently twirling the phone cord around her finger.

“No occasion,” Meg had said. “Maman has gone out to buy groceries, so she won’t know, and I’ve been craving a good éclair all week.”

“That’s not a breakfast,” she’d replied, but then Meg had launched into an earnest, detailed praise of chocolate éclairs and she had not had the energy to refuse. It would be a welcome distraction.

They had come early enough that the display case was still brim-full of cakes and tarts and _viennoiseries_ and, to Meg’s delight, éclairs. They sat in the small square outside the patisserie and surveyed the rue Saint-Antoine through their sunglasses, even though the morning sky was dark with rainclouds, and Christine’s _chocolatine_ was warm and flaky, the currents of chocolate inside molten and dripping down her fingers. A man, the same man from the metro, it seemed, had stopped across the street to scatter some crumbs for a flock of pigeons. The brim of his fedora was pulled low over his face, and she watched him until Meg caught her attention again.

“Remember when we used to make up stories about the strangers we saw on the streets?” she asked, mouth full of choux pastry and whipped cream. Christine smiled.

It was a game they had played, in stolen moments between rehearsals, on the loggia or the roof of the Palais. A dog-walker, an aging woman in furs and pearls, a man in a military uniform and wheelchair. A childish, innocent game. She remembered, with a sort of distant fondness, the elaborate fictions they had spun, hands clasped together, giggling into each other’s shoulders. Meg, a true friend, and fearless, too. Christine had half-expected her to fade away once it was clear that she would not be returning to the opera company - she, all hollowed-out on the inside, barely eating those first months, passive and insensible - but Meg had fought all of her attempts at isolation.

It felt wrong, felt like lying, to sit on this bench and play at normalcy when still she felt nothing.

“Christine?”

She flinched. Meg was frowning at her, and she realized she had been silent too long. “Sorry. Lost in thought. Yes, I remember.”

Meg relaxed slightly. “What do you think about that woman over there? The one with the little dog? Shall we play again?”

She licked the chocolate from her fingers, delaying her response. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, ashamed. “Another time, maybe.”

“All right,” Meg said, with that same tone Raoul had used that first month when he knew he could not reach her. But, no, she could not think of Raoul, not yet, not without her mind conjuring unwelcome images: a flame-red noose, a throne, a pair of lips pulled back in a snarl - those same lips, shocked into stillness beneath hers - _Christine…_

She was looking at the world through an out-of-focus magnifying glass - Meg’s concerned face and the man across the street head tilted in their direction and the distant bell-chime of the patisserie’s front door and a jarring laugh somewhere and -

“Christine!”

A blink, and then she was back to herself again, flexing her sore fingers where they had been clenching the fabric of her skirt. Her eyes caught on Meg’s face again, drawn and white, and it was then that she felt the wetness on her cheeks.

She stood abruptly, flicking off her sunglasses so she could dry her face. They clattered to the ground, scraping on the pavement, and fresh tears sprang, absurdly, to her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, again. “I’m sorry. Can we go?”

Meg nodded mutely. As they left the square, the sky opened and the first thick drops of rain began to fall.

* * *

C minor. Or, perhaps, C sharp minor, or even D flat major. The keys of love-sickness, grief, despair. Self-punishment. The pen hovered, indecisive, centimetres above the sheet of staff paper, empty but for the clefs. Growling, he tore the page in half and tossed the pieces to the side, and threw the pen across the room for good measure. Leaning back, he let his eyes slip shut and ran a shaking hand through his hair, exhaling deeply, _lento_. Eyes closed, he saw bright flares of harmonics and pitches, fragments of melodies, inchoate and tantalizing… Eyes open, pen to paper, they would vanish into the ether.

The flat was littered with the abject evidence of his failure, almost four months’ worth. There was no cleaning service; a word from Samir had convinced the landlord to leave the new tenant, a reclusive, eccentric composer, to his own devices. This new identity, while more comfortable than his previous ones, fit him like a poorly-tailored suit. A man more than half-maddened by misery and shame and self-disgust, barely a man in any sense of the word, with one disastrous opera to his name did not a composer make.

The truth was this: he had lost the music. Or, perhaps more accurately, it had fled, the same way she had.

“No,” he said aloud, and then again, “no.” He could not allow himself to think of her, of anything even slightly adjacent to her, not without crumbling entirely, and that was the problem, wasn’t it, that was the crux of this whole infernal mess. He had come to realize that she had been the wellspring of his inspiration, even before he had stumbled upon her talent at the Palais; somehow, the space in his body where, in a normal man, a heart would rest, the space that was for music, had known to wait for her. And now…

It was too painful to consider: Madame de Chagny, mistress of an estate, hostess of dignitaries and courtesy-titled aristocrats, glittering and golden, on the arm and in the bed of that cursed vicomte…

A curious sound rent the air, and he realized distantly that it was a harsh laugh, devoid of mirth, torn from his own throat. He did not, would never, have the right to think of her in that way. He, depraved and perverse and alone, and unable even to settle on a fucking _key_!

He pulled a fresh sheet of staff paper toward him, plucking a new pen from the repurposed mug at the corner of the desk, and scratched in the treble and bass clefs and urged the notes forth. A sonata for piano. His mind supplied a forceful and atonal opening passage, and he worked furiously to keep up with the unfolding melody, the meeting and divergence of left hand and right, barely remembering to scribble in the accidentals in his haste. A sequence of falling fourths here, the left hand taking up the melody, and throughout, a spiralling harmonic tension, all dissonance and chromaticism.

The pen skidded and slipped from cramped fingers, leaving a thick black welt across several measures. In his stupor he had filled six pages. Leafing through them, tracing jagged strings of notes, he knew they were six pages of unadulterated garbage, ugly and inconsonant noise. _Damnation._

The walls were too close, the air too stagnant, the piled-up detritus and this new, fresh failure mocking and humiliating. He scrambled to retrieve the bandage, seldom-used in his isolation, which he now wore in place of the misplaced porcelain mask, and forewent the suit jacket hanging on the coat rack in his haste to get out of the building, to introduce new air into his lungs. He swept through the door and down the hall and descended the stairs, too wired to wait for the derelict elevator, and upon exiting the building was met by heavy rain.

He heaved in and held the breath, and released it in a gust of condensation. He took off down the street, feeling in his back pocket for the crumpled twenty-franc note he knew must still be there, and cut through the densely packed side-streets until he reached a main thoroughfare. The first few cabs sped by without stopping, and he realized dimly that, bandage covering half his face, out in this weather wearing only waistcoat and rolled-up sleeves, without umbrella or hat, his appearance seemed to rather accurately reflect his inner turmoil.

Finally, a cab swerved to a halt at the curb, and he threw himself inside, and said to the driver, “Place de l’Opéra.”

* * *

By the time they reached the station at Bastille, the nascent drizzle had intensified, slanting almost diagonally so that not even the awnings jutting out over the sidewalk on the way back could provide adequate shelter. They waited on the deserted platform, soaked and shivering.

Footsteps behind them. Christine turned her head to see a man descending the stairs to the platform, fedora sagging and suit dark with rain. It took her a moment to place him, but she realized it was the man in the tan suit from before. She turned back to face the tracks, shifting closer to Meg. She hadn’t thought to wonder before, but - no, it was foolishness, or paranoia; he must be another early riser, had been caught in the rain, same as them, and had sought out the nearest metro station. There was no reason to be suspicious, and anyway, hadn’t the doctor at Yvelines warned her about stress reactions and delusions?

A delusion, yes, a fabrication, like Meg’s game, that was it. Almost four months and she still hadn’t quite overcome the urge to look over her shoulder.

The train came. They boarded, and she dimly registered the man folding himself into a seat halfway down the compartment.

She and Meg settled onto a bench near the door, and she stared unseeing at the flashing darkness outside the window. Now that she’d had the thought, she could not rid herself of it. Suppose he _was_ following them; to what end? Neither she nor Meg dressed in the _yé-yé_ fashions of Courrèges or Quant or Saint-Laurent. He could not be after their money…

Another passenger unfolded a newspaper, the snap and rustle of it jarring against the rattling quiet of the train compartment, and she jumped.

Perhaps she hadn’t eaten enough for breakfast, or perhaps there was something in the stale underground air. Knees shaking and fingers numb, and a strange pressure on her chest, at once stifling and exquisite; she breathed against it with ragged exhalations. Meg stared.

“Christine?”

“I’m fine,” she said, cheeks hot.

They were nearly to the station at République when an absurd idea came to her, startling her heart into a frantic arrhythmic tempo, _prestissimo_ , and she slid off her seat. “I’m going to get off here,” she said. “I need some air. Say hello to Madame for me, will you?”

Meg’s mouth dropped open slightly, and she moved to the edge of her seat uncertainly. “What? Why? You can’t walk the rest of the way, Christine, it’s pouring rain!”

“No,” she said, “no, I’m not going home yet. There’s somewhere I want to go first.” She gathered her purse and scratched-up sunglasses. “I promise. I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

When the train pulled in at République, she jumped out without a backward glance, stumbling almost in her haste to reach the stairs. As she ascended, she was reminded, briefly, of the man in the tan suit; at the top of the stairs, at the corner between this flight and the next, she threw a furtive look over her shoulder -

And there he was, leisurely crossing the platform, fedora angled so that it obscured his features.

Her heart thudded, and she swallowed, and it must be coincidence, it must, this was madness! She should have stayed on the train with Meg, and the man would have disembarked here, and it would all be fine, but now…

But now, her mind strayed again to that wonderful, insane idea, and she found she could not deny it. Up the next flight of stairs, across to the next track, and down to the platform, this one more populated than the last. Did she dare?

Getting on the train felt almost like throwing herself onto the tracks. She forgot to look for the man behind her, forgot to do anything but hold the image in her mind, the giddy ambiguous feeling, the almost-tangible taste (tart and bitter) of what she was about to do.

She reemerged to find the heart of Paris rain-drenched and petrichoric, the usual crowd undeterred by the weather, the familiar dissonant harmonies of car-horns and exclamations ever-present. She crossed the square. Left on the rue Auber, and then onto rue Scribe -

Past the main entrance, through the maintenance door, down the side-hall, and across the Rotonde with the fresco and the dancing nymphs and Baroque gilt, and then everything seemed to blur until she blinked and found herself on the threshold of the auditorium.

_What are you doing, why did you come here, get out, get out -_

This space, so sacred to her, red upholstery and intricate cupola and proscenium. Strange, how the sight and smell of it was the same after all this time, when she was not. But then, it was older than she would ever be, and bigger, too, bigger than her fears and racing heart and _get out get out get out!_

She felt him everywhere, in every seat, in the orchestra pit, the loges, the unlit chandelier, and he was there, he must be, hiding behind the curtain on the stage, poised to jump out and snatch her away again, down a trap-door or between trick walls.

He was not. It was impossible.

But he was there, among the swirling dust-motes around her head, embedded in the worn floorboards under her feet, and she was walking down the aisle through the pit and climbing onto the apron of the stage. The curtain hung heavy and brocaded, sweeping the stage, and she turned to survey the auditorium, shoes squeaking wetly on the floor. She felt his eyes on her from every shadow and corner, every hidden space she knew he’d occupied.

 

_“Again.”_

_She sighed, raising a hand to her face. “Maestro, please, I don’t understand -”_

_“_ Portamento _, Christine, or do I have to teach you basic technique from the beginning?”_

_Her eyes itched with the effort of holding back tears. “It’s been an hour. Can’t we take a break?”_

_She heard a swell of rage in his answering silence, and she couldn’t stop her mouth from trembling._

_“I’m sorry, Maestro, I didn’t mean - I can do this, I’m just - so tired -”_

_“Tired,” he said, but the anger had bled from the air and left an even worse disquiet. “Yes. Forgive me, Christine, I forget how delicate you are.”_

_She bristled. The tears were gone. “Take that back.”_

_A pause. His voice, when it came again, was pitched low. “I beg your pardon?”_

_“I work all day,” she said, “in rehearsals or at the barre, until my feet bleed, and then I come here and work until my voice is raw, and I take your directions and do as you say but I won’t let you insult me!”_

_Her chest heaved with the unexpected force of her temper. Another silence, and this one she couldn’t read. He was quiet for so long she thought perhaps he had vanished, as he did sometimes, but finally a sigh gusted through the room._

_“Oh, Christine,” he breathed, and she shivered and forgave him then, as she always did, at the sound of her name on his lips. Did angels have lips? If they had voices, they must have lips, and skin, and bodies…_

_“_ Portamento _,” she said, and when he sighed again it was fond and grateful._

_“Angel,” she thought she heard him whisper._

 

She had stepped back, unconsciously, fingers grasping at the heavy folds of the curtain. If she moved it aside, just slightly, would she see his eyes in the darkness of the backstage? Would he reach out to her, take her hand, grasp her chin, draw her into the shadows? Would he sing to her, oh, _god_ , she would die to hear him sing again, and how she hated herself for it! Would he put his mouth to her, draw out her music and make it dance with his?

She found that she was trembling, and that she was cold from her still-wet clothes. Her hair dripped down her back. She had promised Meg that she wouldn’t go out in the rain. She had left Meg on the metro. She had come here, alone, had climbed onto the stage and stood like a madwoman, shaking and dazed and out of her mind. She thought, briefly, madly, that she might sing.

A flash of movement at the entrance to the auditorium. Her eyes rose, lethargic and slow in reaction, and the blur resolved into the shape of a man, and then the colour came to her: a yellowish brown, darkened from the rain.

The man in the tan suit.

She raised her eyes to look again, but the doorway was clear. _Delusions_ , she thought, _stress attacks_. But she was less sure of that now, and it was on shaking legs that she climbed down from the stage and hurried up the aisle.

A throb of doubt when she reached the entrance: there was no one there.

Back out the way she’d come, seeing nobody, hearing nothing but the wet squish of her shoes on the floor and _staccato_ breathing. _Why did you come here, why,_ and then his voice, _go, now, go now and leave me -!_

Outside now, jarred from her trance by the sharp bite of rain, she lurched forward a few steps and leaned heavily against the protruding exterior of the Rotonde. The weight on her chest from before was gone, and she felt strangely unanchored, insubstantial.

She looked back over her shoulder. Streams of rain sluiced down the stonework of the west facade, windows dark and inscrutable. A drop of rain fell heavy and sudden on her nose, and she breathed, and turned away, and went home. 

* * *

It couldn’t be. He was dreaming, or dead.

Was he dead? It seemed more likely than the alternative, which was that Christine ( _Christine_ ) had, unimaginably, emerged from the core of a rainstorm and returned to the Palais Garnier. Returned, dripping wet and alone and hazy around the edges. Her hair, long and braided, and something sharp in her face; her skirt, clinging wet to her legs, and the ring on her finger -

There was no ring on her finger.

He slumped against the wall of his hiding place - it had been one of his favourites, with its view of the stage - he was lucky to have chosen this space in particular, enclosed on all sides and difficult to wiggle out of, for had he been in his box, or on the catwalks, or even perhaps the trap room, he could not have held himself back. Even now his body screamed to beat down the barriers that kept her from him.

And she did not wear a ring…

But what could that mean? She and him, the vicomte - there had been a ring, though he thought he himself might have stolen it from her - but even so, there would have been a promise in the absence of a ring, and surely the boy would have replaced it. Why was she here, alone in this cavernous room, in this city, even? Finger bare, and dear god, was she climbing onto the stage?

He was ill, he was feverish and gasping and burning. Perhaps there was no Madame de Chagny, after all. Not now, not ever. This girl, this half-drowned and thin girl, thinner than he remembered, her hair and the mole under her chin, her dancer’s legs, the rigid set of her mouth, _her_ , so bright against the dusk of the auditorium. 

He watched as she stood on the stage, just as she had done almost a year ago, as Elissa. He drank her in, feasted on the sight of her, cursed his eyes for needing to blink. His hands pressed against the false wall in front of him, his muscles coiled with tension, he could not tear his gaze from her.

When she abruptly fled, he stayed bow-backed in his hiding spot, reeling, and then a sweet and plaintive swell of strings rang in his ears. A strand of ascending notes, each one fluent and courageous and sharp and bright. The whole of them, together, a melody unlike anything he had ever committed to paper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note - I took some artistic liberties with the interior plan of the Palais Garnier, since I've regrettably never been in person and am mostly basing my descriptions on Google Maps and various other online resources. Also, for anyone who's interested, I relied on Jan Swafford's book "The Vintage Guide to Classical Music" and Haruki Murakami's book "Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa," as well as my own limited knowledge, when writing about music. I hope I did them justice. 
> 
> (And I promise there will be a plot soon haha.)
> 
> On tumblr under the same name! Come say hi!


	3. Misterioso

The rain had begun to recede by the time she turned onto the rue de la Mare. A persistent shiver had settled in somewhere between République and Lilas, and it was with burgeoning anticipation that she shouldered into her building, thinking of hot tea and a bath. On the train ride back, she had probed at the space in her mind where she had sealed away her memories of the opera house, the space which had now been flung open and which waited expectantly for her attention, but then the shivering had started and she couldn't be sure if it was from the cold or from the insanity of what she'd done, if perhaps her isolation had driven her mad with longing and had finally overtaken her. Whatever the source, she found she could think no more of it without feeling the urge to tear out her hair, and so she picked up a discarded newspaper and distracted herself with it until it was time to disembark.

Something was not right.

Dazed as she was, giddy and unsteady as she was, she knew a throb of apprehension as the door closed behind her: her red scarf hung on the coatrack.

_Raoul -_

This was wrong, all wrong, she had not dared look at it since her flight from Yvelines, had not had the courage to unpack it from the case beneath her bed, and now here it hung, brazen and foreboding.

She grasped for the doorknob, tracing her fingers along the wood of the door to the lock and then to the deadbolt - no scratches, nothing broken, or cracked - could she possibly have done this, have pulled the scarf from its hidden spot?

She knew the answer, despite how desperately she wanted to rationalize it.

Pulse thrumming hot in her ears, knees weak, and she was transported back onto the train this morning, numb and on fire and feeling as though she might scream, and someone had been here, in her home, had rummaged through her case and found the scarf _Oh Raoul so it is you_ and knew the significance of it, knew to drape it just so over the coat rack so it would be the first thing she saw coming in.

She stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, scrambling with the doorknob until it turned and the door swung open, and she fell inside, gripping the lip of the sink, cool against the hot skin of her palms. She turned the taps and waited for the water to grow cold, and gathered it in her hands and brought it to her face once, and then again and again. The cold of the water shocked her calm, although she continued to shiver - her clothes were still soaked - and she dried her face and went back into the hall.

The coat rack was bare.

* * *

There was nothing for it; he needed to know.

It did not take long to dredge up, from the depths of his memory, the image of a building, tall and lean and underfed-looking, matched on either side by indistinguishable facades of faded stucco. He prayed she had not relocated.

It would be senseless to repeat today's mistake - lapse into momentary insanity and inclement weather notwithstanding, he had gambled his already tenuous existence in roaming the city by daylight - and so he waited for the sun to extinguish, for the street lamps to flutter to life, and while he waited, he composed.

Not a sonata for piano, this time, but a cantata for orchestra and voice. He allowed his hand, holding the pen, to move independently of his will, sketching out leaps and trills and _arietta_ , delicate and brilliant and, blessedly, tonal.

When the dark was deep enough, he rose, affixed the bandage to his face, slid on his suit jacket, and left the flat.

There was no conceivable way to remain inconspicuous but to travel by foot through side-streets and alleyways, and so it was some time before he turned onto the rue Bellot, its buildings flanking the street like identicalgrey sentinels. An austere kind of street, and a fitting place of residence for the woman he sought.

He remembered the flight from his demesne under the opera house, almost four months ago, how even then he had endangered himself by foolishly entering Samir's building through the front door. Endangered Samir, too, he realized, although thinking that way bordered uncomfortably on empathy, and he was alarmingly ill-equipped, and unwilling, to address that particular deficiency of his.

He crossed to the next street over and stood beneath the window he knew to be hers. He regretted that the lasso had been left behind; he could have used it to haul himself up, swung it over the railing of the balconette and climbed up that way. Tall as he was, the third-storey window was infuriatingly out of reach.

How had he done this, before? He could not recall ever having cause to steal away to her flat… and if he had, the lasso would have been tucked safely in the lining of his jacket.

"Are you going to stand there all night, or will you be coming in?"

His head snapped up at the voice to find that the window had been thrown open, and there she stood, wrapped in a dressing gown, hair set in curlers, face inscrutable and in shadow from the light inside the flat.

"Coming in," he said finally, abashed, and she disappeared before returning with what looked like a bundle of sheets.

"Forgive the crude contraption," she said, and she unfurled the heap of linen, which turned out to be a number of bedsheets knotted together. "I think it wise that you don't enter the usual way." Then he felt, still without seeing, her shrewd and hawk-like gaze rove over him. "It seems you are of the same mind."

An end of the makeshift rope tumbled down to meet him, and he anchored his hands in it and heaved himself up. Waiting on the other side of the window, she made no move to help him further, only watched his ascent. Once he was through, and could look more clearly upon her face, he still found her expression unfathomable.

"Madame," he said. He wasn't sure if he had meant to say something more, or if the words had simply fled his mouth.

"Monsieur," she replied, with a steely quirk of lips. Her head tilted to the side and she crossed the room and opened the door, and he realized she was beckoning him farther into the apartment.

"Your daughter?" he asked, unmoving. He was half-tempted to recoil, back through the window, to bleed back into the night and forget that he'd come. A foolish errand, this; but then, perhaps part of him had longed to be seen by a person other than Samir who would not immediately cower.

"Asleep," she said, and now there was a new texture to her tone, at once warning and admonitory.

He had no reply to give. Of course she would fear for her daughter's safety - think of what he'd done - what, if he were honest, he couldn't be sure he would not do again, if provoked.

She seemed to take in a breath and hold it, and when it was released, her expression had levelled and gone carefully blank. She tilted her head again, and this time he followed. She led him down a short hall and into a kitchen, narrow and dominated by a scuffed wooden table and chair set, and she gestured for him to sit. He did not, and neither did she, and so they both remained standing.

"I assume you eat and drink, Monsieur le Fantôme?" Madame Giry said, with some humour.

"On occasion," he said. Impatient, he stalked forward, and she craned her neck to look him in the face. "Not now. Madame, may we speak frankly?"

She seemed to solidify in front of him, a straightening of her shoulders and raising of her chin. "Certainly, if you wish it. Shall I go first?"

 _Good God._ Etiquette dictated he defer to her, and, powerless and frustrated, he waved his hand for her to continue.

"Well," she said, folding her hands together in front of her in a quiet display of force - an act he had seen her perform too often for it to intimidate him now, and the curlers in her hair dimmed the effectiveness somewhat - "as it happens, I find I have several things to say to you, and to ask of you, not the least of which being what in God's name you thought you would achieve by coming here tonight. I will spare you the trouble of questions and castigations if you tell me why you are here."

His silence was met with an arched brow.

"Come, Monsieur le Fantôme," she said, spreading her hands, "I thought you desired we be frank with one another."

"Don't call me that," he said harshly.

The other brow shot up to match the first. "Oh? How am I to address you, then? I'll tell you now, I refuse to call you 'Don Juan.'"

"I have a name," he said, strained. He did not wish to reveal this to her, of all people, she who knew already too much of his past - but there was no way to deny her this, not without sacrificing the whole damned purpose of this visit. "It is Erik."

Her affected expression wavered for a moment, and he saw something disarmingly young in the creases at her eyes and the jut of her chin before it slid back into place. "Very well. Erik."

The second person, after Samir, to use that name, and the disagreeable sensation of hearing it spoken was as fresh as it had been four months ago.

He waited for her to resume speaking, but she simply watched him, and so he opened his mouth.

"Mademoiselle Daaé," he began, and her face drained of colour.

"No," she whispered, "you leave that girl be, do you hear? You have caused her enough grief already for a lifetime -"

"Calm yourself," he snapped. Shame, irritation, self-loathing, and he was briefly submerged, but he dug his nails into his palms and forced himself up for air. "I must know, and then I will leave you in peace - the vicomte -"

She peered at him, as though assessing something, and then she shocked him by breaking their deadlock and pulling out a chair. She sat heavily, and ran a hand over her face. "It is not a story to which I am privy," she said finally, "and even if it were, I would not tell you."

He choked back a desperate growl and tossed his head, and her eyes snapped up to his and blazed, briefly, before turning flinty. Dangerous, that her temper was rising to meet his…

"Do you know, Monsieur," she said, voice tight with anger, "what Mademoiselle Daaé has endured since that night? Did you know she could not sleep, or eat? Did you know I took her in, a month, and all that time she lay in bed?" Now she stood, rising to her full height, and she seemed to crackle, and he had forgotten how to breathe - Christine, despondent and hurting and traumatized, his fault, his fault - _no_ \- "Did you know she has neither sung, nor danced, nor tolerated the sound of music since _that night,_ has not even had the strength to return to the Palais?"

A persistent ache in the barren cavity of his chest. _No, no_ \- "She has," he heard himself say, as from a distance. _Fool_ \- "She has returned, because I saw her there."

The slap came as a surprise.

Face stinging, he staggered, bracing a hand on the table, and stared - she had never once laid a hand on him -

"You come to my home," she said, eyes afire once more, "you mislead, you deceive, you tell me you have no business with her and then say you have seen her - have you taken her again, Monsieur Opera Ghost, have you come to bargain for her life?" She paused, heaving for breath, and sat back down, pressing a shaking hand to her breast. "What am I to think?"

Would he never escape the pounding roar in his ears, the gut-twisting feeling of watching the world's edges blur and haze and grow dark? Had he known this would happen - had he known - and now Christine, broken, and Madame Giry, steady-gazed and coldly triumphant, and he could not summon the words to defend himself, for they did not exist. The accusation of a crime he had not committed should hardly stop him up, but that was not it; for some absurd reason, what shook him was rather the woman's proclivity to so readily believe him culpable.

That old rage, the desire to hurt and bruise and take something good into his hands and destroy it. It had been there lurking all night, fed by her first taunting words, but his preoccupation had muted it. No longer; now it thundered to life and he felt it hot in his face - how his distended flesh burned! - _fortissimo,_ all the way to his fingertips.

She watched him silently as he struggled, table creaking from bearing the force of his weight, and a new wariness gradually crept across her features, spoiling the carefully cultivated indifference. He found he could speak again.

"Watch yourself," he said, words tumbling onto the table between them in a sibilant growl. He was gratified to see her face whiten again.

Control, that elusive restraint, that was what he needed; he must not be conquered by this… What had he come for? Christine, the image of her so fresh from this morning, muted and pale but _her_ , could not fully rouse him from this pounding miasmatic fog.

"She does not wear his ring!" he burst out. Rage, and fury, but now it felt bitterer, like a long-congealed anguish.

Madame Giry trembled, just slightly, and something in him, in his voice or his demeanour, must have spoken to her, for she said, "I will tell you what I know, which is very little: she came to me after a month and would say nothing other than that she had come from the vicomte's residence outside of Paris. Her belongings arrived shortly after she did. As I said," she continued, "she stayed for a little over a month, and by the end of that time had secured a flat - and don't you ask me to tell you where it is."

From the vicomte's residence, where she had convalesced for a month… His fingers curled into a fist against the table. "I do not intend to reveal myself to her," he rasped.

She laughed, a harsh and brutal sound. "Forgive me if I find that hard to believe."

"What you do or don't believe is not my concern," he said, injecting as much venom into his tone as possible, and something spiteful and bitter bloomed within his chest to see her shrink back. "Now, if you have nothing else useful to say…"

He turned to leave; she stood so quickly the chair shot out from under her.

"I certainly do," she said. _Fucking hell - h_ e was torn between annoyance and admiration at her tenacity, and he swung around and fixed her with a glare.

"Spit it out, then, Madame," he said, spreading his hands, and the corners of his mouth twitched into what must have been a ghastly grin, and though he wore a bandage in place of the half-mask and he had no cloak to whirl or hat to toss, for the briefest of moments he felt the mantle of the Opera Ghost settle death-like around his shoulders once more.

From the look on Madame Giry's face, so did she. She took a sharp breath, nostrils flaring, and righted the chair. Still she stayed silent.

"I am dying," he growled, louder than he ought to have, "or, at least, it feels that way - I knew I would not survive long without her, but now, having seen her again, knowing she is there, that I can never… it is as though the process has accelerated."

She regarded him then with something alarmingly close to pity. His mouth tightened and his skin burned and he jerked forward, to do what he didn't know, but she raised a hand to stay him. "What you describe is love, Erik."

"What would you know of it," he said, cruelly. _Erik. Erik._

She smiled, surprising him. "Oh, very little, I'm sure."

"Whatever it is," he muttered, "it rules me, and has consumed me all the more after this meagre glimpse of her. I didn't lie: I will not go to her. I'm not so foolish as to think I might - that she would - you must promise, Madame, promise you will not tell her that I -"

She stepped forward, and he clapped a hand over the bandage and lurched back. Damn it, he had revealed too much, felt flayed open and raw, couldn't breathe, cheek still sore from her strike, and even though she reached out to him, he fled back down the hall and into her room, where the makeshift bedsheets-rope still hung tied to the balconette. He shoved himself through the window, barely catching at the rope on his descent, slamming hard against the wall.

Something in him itched when he reached the end of the street, and he looked back, and the bedsheets were gone, but he saw her outline in the window, just briefly before the light turned off, and it was as if this entire episode had been a dream. He turned back around, favouring his right side where it had been impacted by the side of the building, and limped home.

* * *

She ran for the bed, tearing the bedsheets off and reaching into the space underneath - there, the case, right where she'd left it - and she dragged it out and fumbled with the latch and threw it open. A white gown, neatly folded, and a handful of postcards from Perros, and some other tchotchkes. She dug underneath the dress and her fingers caught on age-soft wool. Shaking, she pulled it out from beneath: the red scarf.

Clutching it in her fist, she stepped back into the hall. The coat rack was still bare, of course; she did not have two red scarves. But she had seen it there, she knew she had -

Back to the front door, pulling it open to reveal an empty hallway. Across the flat, the window was still bolted shut.

She was too hot, or, no, too cold, and she couldn't force her body to move but couldn't bear to be still, either, and it was all so much; could she have dreamed it, the scarf being there? Was it possible she had imagined it, that her mind, peeled open and tender and exposed now, had invented it, had tricked her eyes into seeing what was not there?

Or… the alternative was almost too frightening to even think. Had someone been here? Broken in, but left no sign of it? Her mind jumped to the man in the tan suit, and she knew it made no rational sense, that she was overly suspicious of one man in a city of thousands, and anyway, if someone had done this, how could they have replaced the scarf in so little time? How would they know about the case under her bed? There was some strange heaviness in her head, and there was no thinking straight, not with her blood rushing and breaths coming short and, still, the shivering.

She almost laughed. Which was the most savoury option: that she was insane, or that someone out there seemed to know exactly what would make her crumble?

She shut the door again, locking it, thinking distantly that perhaps she ought to install another deadbolt, and staggered into the kitchen. The silence in the flat was suddenly too thick and piercing, and she switched on the wireless. She was met with a moment of static before the midday France Inter broadcast, and she heard without listening the week's weather forecast, fiddling absently with the scarf.

The newscaster transitioned to a segment on the local news, and the idea had just come to her to phone Meg when she heard - but no, it was impossible, how could it be, on the wireless -

_Christine Daaé._

She turned the dial for the volume.

_Christine Daaé. Christine Daaé._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	4. Mosso

_May 1964_

Raoul and Philippe were arguing again. She knew this because the study was occupied, and the study was never occupied unless Philippe visited, and when Philippe visited, he and Raoul argued.

She was sitting in the garden when she heard the rumble of an engine starting, and Raoul came from around front a little while later, face pinched and posture stiff.

"Philippe's gone," he said, rolling his shoulders. "I'm sorry for leaving you alone. You know how he is."

She smiled blandly and focused her gaze on a meandering butterfly. "It's all right. I'm fine by myself, you know."

If she looked up, she would see the concern dampening his eyes, drawing his brows together. She kept her gaze down.

"I almost believe you," he said, and she did look up then. There was a wry little smile pulling at his lips, but his eyes were just as she'd predicted.

She shifted, patting the bench beside her, and he sat, and she pulled her dressing gown tighter around her and rested her head on his shoulder. For some time, there were only the warbling sounds of nature: the rustle of grass and leaves, the hum of insects, and the play of water in the stream by the tree line. She had sunk into a comfortable daze when Raoul spoke again.

"I'm not," he said abruptly. "Fine by myself. I'm not."

"Raoul?"

"I still see you in that dress," he said quietly, "and the noose around my neck, I still feel it sometimes. And - his face - "

She raised her hand to his cheek and covered his mouth with hers. The things she wanted to say - _I'm not fine either_ or _I see his face at night_ or _if you died, I would die too_ or _I never want to speak of this ever again_ \- could not be said, and there was no other comfort she could bring him, not when she was just as broken, when she still dreamed of ghosts.

He grasped at her shoulders, latching onto her fiercely, and several long moments were filled with the gentle slide and catch of lips on lips, familiar and honey-sweet and safe. With every movement, she knew it was he, Raoul, and she let him fill her senses until they had to part for air.

"Christine," Raoul said, a little ragged, eyes closed.

"What did Philippe want?" she asked.

His brow puckered a moment at the non sequitur, and then smoothed. He leaned back and laughed lightly, but he had tensed again. "Nothing important. Just the usual, really, scolding me for my life choices."

She winced. "I'm not helping your case by being here."

"No, Christine," he said, and tilted her face up. When she met his eyes, they were warm and adamant. "Don't say that. I want you here, and I don't care who disagrees."

She slid her hands from him and shifted to lean on his shoulder again, and he brought his arm around her, and they sat together in the garden, peaceful and idyllic and safe and alive.

* * *

_July 1964_

The wireless had not been hard to break. She would have thrown it from the window, but that would have made more of a mess than she could handle, so she filled the bathtub and heaved the machine into it, and it sank to the bottom with a thud. It was still in there; foolish, but she was reticent to touch it again.

The phone had rung, twice. She had been half-tempted to cut the cord, but had finally decided just to leave it off the hook, and so it now dangled upside-down. She could hear the dial tone faintly from the other end of the flat. It could have been anyone, was probably Meg, back at home, wondering what the hell had come over her this morning - this morning, which felt years in the past, rather than hours - but she couldn't bring herself to answer it, she couldn't, because what if, on the other end of the line, it was -

She didn't know. Her mind conjured images of the man in the tan suit, whose face she had never properly seen, who morphed into a faceless woman, who became…

Him.

The thought had crossed her mind: who else knew her well enough? Not only that, but would go to such lengths to get inside her head, to disturb her, to torment her? Either alternative, insanity or otherwise, was frightening, but if there was a chance - if, perhaps, he had lived - had she woken him, like some eldritch creature, this morning at the opera house?

No. No, he was not a ghost, but a man, she had found this out, and could this be his work?

The rain had stopped but the sky did not clear, and her bathtub was full of water and a wireless radio, and the telephone hung off its cord in the kitchen, and she crouched on her bed, covers gathered around her, and she thought. At some point she had gotten up and rummaged around under the bed again, pulling out her father's violin, and she had taken it from its case and held it to her chest. She did not play, not very well, but she drew her fingers absently over the strings, tracing the grooves and worn wood of the instrument.

Dimly, she felt the first stirrings of anger, at herself and her weakness and fear and lethargy, at the circumstances which had collectively led to this state of half-living. Always looking over her shoulder, afraid of the dark. Somewhere along the way, she had become a voyeur to her own life, hovering somewhere above the action, watching and reacting but never engaging. There had been a moment, beneath the earth and surrounded by swirling mist and candelabra, when she had felt powerful, had taken her life in hand and acted. Had saved herself, at the expense of another.

Had he even a name? She hadn't thought to wonder, before now… A name, the ultimate proof of humanity, and she almost laughed to think that such a creature of shadow and smoke could have one.

Her thoughts drifted back to the scarf and the wireless, and she wondered again if it were possible… She had no way to know what had become of him, had refused to speak of that night to anyone when she'd returned to Paris, had hardly let herself imagine the aftermath. Could he truly be behind this? A small part of her hesitated - the way he had softened against her as she kissed him, the way his arms had almost come to hold her, the way he had looked when she left for the last time - he was no phantom, no angel of music, but a man broken and humbled. How could he possibly reverse that transformation?

She sat and thought, and thought, and grew angrier; when had she reverted back to the passive and docile version of herself? She had felt it, she had almost broken through, but then almost four months had passed in a lifeless fog and she was reminded of her father's death, when she was insensible to anything but the blanketing reality of her own grief.

This, this was a new feeling, of simmering frustration and nascent rage, and of relief, too, relief that there was finally some feeling other than the emptiness, and she focused on the anger, let it animate her blood, let it slowly fill the hollow within her chest.

The sky gradually darkened until night dusted the rooftops, and still she huddled on the bed, and she had stopped fiddling with the violin but held it clutched in her arms, and something in the back of her mind told her to do something: phone Meg, phone the police, cut the phone cord altogether. She could not call Meg, because she would insist on coming down, and the streets of Paris were not safe at night. Meg would come by tomorrow, as usual, and then she could apologize for this morning, and maybe seeing her would shake her from this fugue.

There would be no point in calling the police, other than to make a fool of herself, and anyway, she hardly believed it. _Hello, officer, I had forgotten that I'd misplaced my scarf, and then the wireless started talking to me._ Insanity…

She hadn't realized that morning had come when she heard the knock on the door and the muffled sound of Meg's voice.

"Christine? Are you ready?"

Her throat worked for a few moments before she found her voice. "Yes!"

The doorknob rattled and she heard the door creak open. "Christine?" Meg's voice, closer now. "The door's unlocked…"

The sound of Meg's footsteps, coming round the corner.

"I forgot to lock it last night," she said, too slowly.

"Christine - " the bed dipped, and she blinked and refocused her eyes: Meg had perched on the corner. "Are you all right?"

"No," she said.

Meg sighed. "You look like you haven't slept, and you're wearing yesterday's clothes, and your door is unlocked… "

"I'm sorry for leaving," she said, interrupting. She looked up again to see Meg's confusion, and went on, "On the metro yesterday, I'm sorry for leaving."

"Where did you go? I tried calling, but - "

"No, the phone's off the hook," she said. "I went to the opera house."

A moment of silence, and then Meg's weight left the bed and resettled closer.

"Is that why you're here like this? Because it was - too much?"

"Something like that," she mumbled. She abruptly realized how bizarre she must appear, swaddled in a blanket, clutching her father's violin, still dressed in yesterday's rain-stained clothes. Her cheeks flushed.

Meg's hand came up to smooth back her hair, and she leaned heavily against her shoulder. Meg petted her hair for a few moments before saying, uncertainly, "I'll be late if we don't leave soon… I think you ought to come with me, and then we can come back and pack some of your things. Maman will not mind you staying with us."

"Meg, I can't impose on you again."

"You can hardly take care of yourself! Leaving the door open - and why is the phone off the hook? And when was the last time you ate?"

She couldn't answer; it had been the chocolatine yesterday morning.

"I'm worried about you," Meg said anxiously.

She met Meg's eyes, and they were wet. "I know," she said. "I - I know I haven't been well. I thought I was, that I would be fine on my own. But, Meg, something's happened."

"Do you mean - the Palais?"

"No," she said, "or, not exactly. It's… I feel like I'm waking up. From a very long sleep. And…" the words she wanted, the words to explain her behaviour, to describe the strange man, the new feelings, the apartment, seemed just out of reach, and she sighed. "I'm afraid," she said simply.

"Oh, Christine," Meg said, curling an arm tight about her shoulders.

"I'm afraid," she repeated, "but I also feel - I can't explain it. It's like I need to breathe but there's something in the way."

"You need to get out of this flat," Meg said firmly. "It's not good for you, being here alone, and I can't stand seeing you like this. You're not yourself. Just - come stay. For a little while."

She opened her mouth to refuse again, but closed it uncertainly. If she stayed, she would be waiting in constant fear of something else happening, of her things moving about, of some new invasion. If she went with Meg…

"All right," she found herself saying. "Just for a little while."

She tucked the violin back into its case and dressed in fresh clothes and they left, making sure to lock the door. What would she be coming back to at the end of the day?

* * *

The door was ajar. Her eyes had found it out the moment they'd reached the floor, and now there was a ringing in her ears because _the door was ajar_.

She turned to Meg. "You saw me lock the door this morning, didn't you?"

"Yes… Christine, what's going on?"

She reached to push the door farther open, and Meg caught at her arm. "What are you doing? You can't go inside - what if someone's in there - we need to call the police!"

Only a sliver of darkness was visible in the space between the door and its frame, and the silence within the apartment was somehow both innocuous and foreboding, and yet she knew she would find it empty. Something, some instinct, told her there was no one inside waiting for her.

"I'll have to go inside to get to the phone," she pointed out, shaking Meg's hand off.

"Are you insane? Ask one of your neighbours to use theirs!"

"No, look," she said, and pushed at the door with her foot. It swung inward, revealing the dark interior of the apartment. She released a breath and noted that the coat rack was, blessedly, bare. "Look, no one's there."

"They could be hiding somewhere - _Christine_!"

She'd gone inside, and she heard Meg huff behind her before following.

Some strange electricity danced across her skin, raising the hair on her arms and the back of her neck. There was no fear, not now, not when she knew for certain that she'd been right. She was not having delusions, and she was not paranoid. The fear would come later, she knew, after the adrenaline.

Through the hall, past the bathroom, around the corner to the kitchen. She flicked on the overhead light. The phone still hung from its cord.

Meg saw it before she did. "What's that - on the table?"

A cream-coloured folder, unsealed.

"Don't touch it," Meg said. "It could be dangerous."

"They don't make bombs that small," Christine said, reaching for it. She grasped it by the corner between thumb and forefinger and drew it across the table toward her.

The folder contained a thin stack of papers: sheet music. She flipped through the pages. All sheet music, part of a libretto, written in German…

"Some kind of score?" Meg asked, peering over Christine's shoulder.

She held up the first page again. Halfway down, the vocal part began, and she read the name assigned to it. Her heart thrummed, and she felt that flickering electricity again, that now-familiar constricting of her chest. "It's _Salome_ ," she said. "By Strauss."

"I don't know it…"

She recognized it now, from the music and from the first line of the lyrics. _Ah! Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan…_ "'I kissed your mouth, Jochanaan,'" she whispered. Raising her voice for Meg, she explained, "It's - it's the final scene of the opera, and Salome is singing about her love for the prophet Jochanaan, whose head was brought to her on a platter."

Meg made a noise of disgust.

The final scene… Trembling now, hands shaking, Christine shuffled through the rest of the pages until she found the last one.

"She sings to his severed head," she said, "and kisses it. The king orders his men to kill her." _Man tötedieses_ _Weib!_

"And then?"

She raised her eyes to Meg's. "The soldiers crush her to death beneath their shields."

A dreadful silence, the only sound that of their harsh breathing and the quiet hum of the bulb above their heads. Meg's face was washed out in the light, and the shadows under her eyes stretched oddly over her cheeks. Christine's heart caught and beat wrongly, and her mind seemed to be turning too slowly, unable to grasp properly at reality.

"We need to call the police," Meg said again.

"Not here," she replied. She still clutched at the final page of _Salome_. "I don't - the phone might be bugged."

Meg groaned, her eyes closing. "You're right. You're right. We'll use the phone at home."

The air seemed unnaturally dense and heavy as they moved quickly about the apartment, gathering the few things she wanted to bring with her: some clothes, her case, her father's violin. She stopped as they were almost out the door, turning back to the bathroom.

"One second," she said, and went in to pull the bath-plug. The water chugged down the drain, the wireless sitting absurdly in the tub, and she had to smother an inappropriate laugh at the utter lunacy of this situation.

When she reemerged, Meg raised her eyebrows and levelled her with an expectant look. "What was that about?"

"I'll explain later, when we get to your place. It's - it'll sound strange."

Meg's eyebrows lowered. "I've seen strange," she reminded her. "I was there for all the Phantom's misdeeds, or have you forgotten?"

In truth, she _had_ almost forgotten this, forgotten that he had had victims other than her and Raoul, Buquet and Piangi. Selfish.

"Of course," she said. "I'm sorry. Let's go."

* * *

They walked to the metro station in the rising darkness, and she kept her eyes low to the ground, clutching the violin case to her chest. Whoever had broken into her flat - what did they mean by leaving her the final scene of _Salome_? Was it some kind of death threat? Was this the same person that had manipulated the wireless? She was sure, now, that it had not been in her imagination, that someone must have tampered with the radio frequencies - was that even possible? And what of the scarf? For it to have been replaced in the case so quickly… a chill zipped down her spine as she realized fully that she hadn't been alone in her flat that day, and it was then that the adrenaline broke and the fear flooded back in. It mingled oddly with the anger form before, and she wanted more than anything else to close her eyes for a time. The train ride was tense, and they sat side by side in silence.

"Christine? We're here."

The air had chilled by the time they resurfaced, and they crossed the remaining distance to the Girys' at a brisk pace. When Meg shouldered the door open - it always stuck a bit - they were met with the sound of Madame's favourite Piaf record. Christine gritted her teeth, wishing for silence.

Madame's voice, from the kitchen: "Meg, is that you?"

Meg shut the door, leaning Christine's case against the wall. "Yes, and I've brought a guest!"

"Ah, Christine," Madame said briskly, coming into the hall. "Will you be staying for dinner?"

"I - yes, thank you."

She nodded and crossed to the living room, from whence the music abruptly stopped.

Christine's chest loosened in the absence of it. "Please, don't turn it off on my account," she called weakly, but Madame reappeared, shaking her head.

"I was getting tired of it. Come in, and wash up before dinner, please - you can put your things in Meg's room." So she had noticed the luggage.

"Madame - "

"You are welcome to stay as long as you need," she said, and though her tone was firm there was a shade of warmth to it, and for a breathless moment - and not for the first time - Christine yearned for her own mother.

Dinner was subdued and ended quickly, the conversation held up primarily by Madame Giry and Meg and consisting of perfunctory small talk. After she and Meg had washed the dishes, Christine thought to pull Madame aside to inform her of the true reason for her visit, but Meg spoke up first.

"Maman," she said, and Madame halted in the doorway. "Something's happened to Christine."

Christine lingered over the sink, passing the dishcloth over a plate and over it again, as Meg retold the events of the last two days. Madame's face had become grave and still by the end.

"I see," she said finally, and paused a moment, a muscle in her jaw working. Christine set down the plate. "Meg, I'd like a moment alone with Christine, if you please."

"Alright," Meg said, and as she left she gave Christine a long, significant look.

She knew Meg would expect a full summation of what they had discussed later, but what she intended to speak of with Madame would be for her ears only. There was no need to trouble Meg any more.

Madame sat again at the table and gestured for Christine to sit across from her. For a moment, there was only the sound of Meg moving around down the hall, and only the feeling of her heart, hiccuping and strangely erratic. But she was safe, here, now, and somehow she was certain Madame would put her fears to rest.

"I know what you are thinking," Madame said finally, slowly.

"Do you think it could be him?" Christine asked. Oh - she hadn't realized until now just how desperate she was for an answer, for even a shred of information that might alleviate the pressure on her chest and the wakefulness of her mind.

Madame's fingers tightened where they rested locked together on the table. "No," she sighed, as though the admission had been wrested from her throat against her will, "and I am certain of it."

But that made it sound like - "How are you so certain?"

Madame sighed again, nostrils flaring. She glanced once, quickly, over her shoulder, likely to ensure Meg was not nearby attempting to eavesdrop, and she said lowly, "I have seen him, spoken to him. This is not his doing."

If she had thought, before, that the world might fall away upon her hearing news of him or even speaking of him aloud, she had thought wrong. It was rather as though the world blazed stronger and more saturated and almost too bright, and she squinted and breathed in heavily from the surge of it.

"When? Where?" She realized, with some surprise, that her hands were shaking, and she laid them flat against the table to still them. This felt like more than a small moment in a kitchen, felt rather like a turning point, and however Madame chose to respond would alter reality in some monumental way. When had she last felt this alive, pulsing with energy and blood and an excitement that resembled fear?

"I will not say," Madame replied, "for I believe he values his privacy, though God only knows why I am respecting it, after everything."

"But he is here? In Paris?"

Madame's gaze on her, heavy and searching. "Yes."

She breathed out. Had he retreated back to his subterranean dwelling, or was he aboveground, eating and sleeping and living in a flat in a Parisian _faubourg_ , playing at humanity?

"What did he say to you? Please, can you tell me?"

"He wished for me not to reveal his presence to you," Madame said. "He… he swore to me he would not seek you out. He was… rather rigid on that point."

She found that difficult to believe, but if he had sworn… and Madame would have intervened if she thought he did not mean it, she was sure.

"It can't be him," she said quietly, "and if it can't be him, then who is it?"

Madame did not reply.

"Meg thinks we should call the police," she continued, "but I - "

"No," Madame interrupted. "No, you would not be believed; unfortunately, they receive far too many paranoid calls of a similar nature for a genuine case to be accepted." She stood suddenly, and gave Christine a wan smile. "It's late, and you look so tired. Why don't you go draw a bath?"

She understood this as a dismissal, and Madame put a hand on her shoulder as she passed. When she reached the bathroom at the end of the hall, she turned back to see that the older woman, leaning heavily against the doorway of the kitchen, had brought a hand to her face. A stab of guilt: she did not want to burden the Girys with this new trouble.

Perhaps a bath would do her good, and then sleep, and tomorrow… tomorrow, she didn't know. She thought again of the _Salome_ music, and did not know how to feel about it. Tomorrow, then, she would put her mind to this new development. Tomorrow.

* * *

When she heard the water running in the bathroom, she marched swiftly down the hallway to the bedroom, and she dug beneath long-disused ballet slippers and nylons for the plain white card. Ten numbers, written in a slanting black-inked hand.

"Maman?" Meg, calling from her bedroom.

She straightened, tucking the card into her sleeve. "A moment, Meg!"

She moved to the kitchen, twisting the sink taps so that the water flowed thick and loud, and then she picked up the phone and dialled the number.

"Hello?" The voice on the other end was gruff and deep.

"Hello," Madame Giry said. "I'm calling about our mutual friend."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been updating more regularly on ffn and neglecting ao3, it seems - apologies for the wait!


	5. Marcato

The night passed, and young morning light crept in, soft and diffuse. Meg slept deeply beside her, and Christine slipped quietly from the room and followed the hall to the sitting-room, which was close and cramped and lined with an atrocious rose-patterned wallpaper. Pushed up against the far wall was a barre, and she went to it and began the warm-up routine she had once done every morning with the other ballerinas: a barre stretch and arch presses, demi pliés into full pliés, and tendus, degagés, ron de jambes, and developpés. Her muscles protested after months of disuse, and she corrected her movements for the time she had lost, slowing and concentrating hard on each element of the positions.

The light had warmed and deepened in tone and she had transitioned into battements tendus by the time Meg and Madame Giry rose, and the latter's steady footsteps approaching from the hall brought her back to herself. She stepped away from the barre, feeling vaguely foolish at having had the idea to practice ballet in her sleepwear. She thought to pick up a book, to make it seem as though she had come to do anything other than dancing, but as soon as the thought came to her she dismissed it; Madame was shrewd and would see through her, but more than that, she knew her to be sympathetic. Stern and Spartan and censorious, but she could be all those things and sympathetic, too.

She returned to the barre and resumed her warm-up, and Madame's footsteps paused only briefly before continuing on to the kitchen, and her command for straighter posture drifted by as though as an afterthought. Christine smiled, and wished for someone to commiserate with – Meg, if she hadn't been elsewhere, would have rolled her eyes and grinned, and turned back to her effortless pose. Sorelli would have sniffed in disdain, but there would be a gleam in her eye and later, out of earshot, she would become one of Madame's most vehement critics.

It had not been often that she had felt truly like a ballerina, and she had never been a dancer, not like they were, from young ages, bodies trained rigid and willowy. She found, not for the first time, that she missed being part of something, even if it was not to her strength and she was always held somehow apart from the rest.

She abandoned the barre and went to help Madame in the kitchen.

Meg slouched in later and ate her breakfast with an intent grimace—Christine thought of her taste for éclairs and fought a smile—and Madame glared over her newspaper until the food was gone and Meg had returned to her room to dress.

When they were alone, Madame rose and said, "You will stay inside, and do not go outside even for a moment. In fact, you ought to stay away from the windows as well."

A bitter taste in her mouth, at having her actions dictated thusly. She swallowed it down and nodded.

"Good." Madame smoothed down her spotless dress and took a breath, and when she released it, she appeared taller, and more like Madame the Ballet Mistress than Madame the Reluctant Hostess. "You will not answer the telephone if it rings, or the door, which will be locked." Now her tone, if not her face, softened. "I don't like to cage you in, Christine, but understand that I must now assume neither you nor we are safe."

The bitter taste returned, and this time it was cloying and almost overpowering. She should not have come here, no matter Meg's demands—what had she thought, that Madame might know how to solve this? No, she had thought, impetuously, to soothe her own suspicions, she had barely considered the rest—if she was being watched, if she had been followed—

"Don't go feeling guilty," Madame said. "It will do us little good now."

A silence followed Madame's reproach, and she was struggling to find the words that would together form an adequate apology when Madame spoke again.

"It is not for forever," she said, clumsy in her attempt at comfort. "I have… contacted someone, a colleague, who has agreed to investigate the situation."

"A colleague?" She had the bizarre notion of one of the stagehands from the opera house, sheathed fully in black spy clothing, or perhaps a trench coat and deerstalker.

Madame's face twitched as though she knew what she was imagining. "An old friend, whose particular expertise may be of great service to us. It is my hope that some form of evidence might be found and brought to the police."

She could not see how any sort of proof could be found, but Madame's face was set and determined, and she thought back to the Salome music tucked away in her case and wished for Madame's faith in this colleague.

After they had left, Christine had slid the deadbolt into place as instructed and gone to dress. She browsed Madame's small collection of books for a time, and picked one off the shelf at random and spent an hour translating it into Swedish before growing bored. She threw herself onto Meg's bed, covers still rumpled from sleep, and stared into the open wardrobe. She washed the breakfast dishes again, and dried them and put them away. She translated some more of the book until her hand cramped around the pen, and she found herself back on Meg's bed.

Little to do in this apartment, save for contemplating her situation, an undesirable idea which pushed persistently at her consciousness. For a moment the room went gray as a cloud passed over, and she turned her face into the sun when it reappeared, slanting through the half-drawn curtain in an uneven slice of warmth.

It was hard to lay here in the sun and think of yesterday, but she turned the memory over in her mind: the open door, the folder, the music. The full weight of what had happened, of what it must mean, still seemed not to touch her, only hung like a shadow somewhere over her head. She thought to herself, someone has been following me, and someone has been inside my flat, and someone might want me dead.

She could not think what she had done to incur this, and if it could not be him, then who? And why now?

Her thoughts drifted, and she imagined him as she had yesterday, not in evening-wear but in day clothes, a brown suit perhaps, and she imagined him doing something ordinary, shopping in Les Halles or perusing the Louvre, sitting in a bistro somewhere or walking the banks of the Seine. The image of him in these places was hazy and incomplete, and it was because he was too unearthly to belong to a Paris of daylight and her mind knew it, and could not finish the imagining. She thought of him at night, thought that he could wander Paris at night and exist there, a chimera that had pried itself from its stone bindings on the parapet of Notre-Dame and escaped to roam the city by moonlight.

Some time ago her eyes had closed, and the sun was warm and the bedsheets soft and she fell into sleep between one breath and the next. There were no dreams, or if there were she did not remember them when she woke, some hours later, to a heaviness in her head and the sun at its brightest. Meg and Madame would not be back until the sun had dipped below the rooftops. She had the sudden idea to have dinner ready for them upon their return, and she rose, rolling her stiff neck, and went off in search of a recipe book.

The next days, and the next few after those, were long and dull and the time seemed to move sluggishly, catching and stuttering and occasionally, it seemed, halting altogether, but never moving quickly.

Madame had never spoken again of her colleague, and her attempts to find out more were rebuffed, and so she would wait for Madame to bring news. She brought out the Salome music and traced the notes, held the pages up to the light as if by doing so she might solve the mystery of them, and she beat down the urge to tear them up. She seemed to have exchanged one sort of cage for another.

On the third day of her confinement, she crept into Madame's room and opened the window there and stuck her head out—it opened onto an alley between this street and the next, it could not be such a risk, and it had been too long without fresh air and something new to look at.

She looked below to the pavement, and the neglected bed of purple flowers choked by weeds that lined the perimeter of the building. A slight wind fanned her face, and she leaned farther out the window and thought longingly of walks in the Bois or the garden of the Tuileries, grassy lawns dappled by the play of sunlight over tall trees. The daydream could only sustain her for so long, and soon the chipped brick of the building opposite and the dying flowers below grew tedious. She closed the window.

The fifth day was dark with raincloud and she knew upon waking that it was to be long and dour, and she longed to go back to sleep but Madame would not stand for it. They left, she stayed, and morning came and went.

Mid-afternoon, and she was paging through a recipe book, having been told by Madame that if she were to take up cooking she ought to make less fattening meals, Meg's expression at this comical behind her mother's back. She'd decided to make a béchamel sauce anyway, and there was the recipe, near the back of the book. She frowned: they didn't have enough milk.

Her heart skipped a moment, as though in anticipation of the idea that had just begun to form in her mind—there was a small grocery not far from here, and it could not be more than ten minutes there and back. She could pick up the milk, come back, and start dinner. She could wear a kerchief over her hair, hold an umbrella close to her head, and no one would know it was her.

Could she?

It would be perhaps the most stupid, irresponsible thing she had ever done, worse in a sense than following a specter of a man through a mirror, for she would be doing this with a clear head and in defiance of all reason; and she told herself this even as she riffled through Meg's wardrobe for a kerchief, and told herself again as she went in search of an umbrella.

Disobeying Madame's wishes, likely exposing herself and the Girys to some new threat, the Girys, who had shown her kindness and compassion and were fearless, who did not deserve to be drawn into this—

She stopped just short of the door, and for the space of some shallow breaths, her mind whirled and she could not decide. Then, she thought of the fear and of the anger that had broken through the fear, and she knew her choice, stupid and irresponsible as it was.

She had always been this way, hadn't she? Doing what she ought not to do, going where she ought not to go, consequences an afterthought?

The air outside smelled lightly of cut grass and the stirrings of rain, and she breathed in deeply and opened the umbrella and set off. She bought the milk and halfway back the rain began in earnest, and the skirt of her dress was speckled with raindrops by the time she reached the Girys' building.

She unlocked the door and pulled off the kerchief and discarded the umbrella as soon as she was inside, and she went to put the milk away in the kitchen.

Her gaze swerved over a shape on the table, on the periphery of her vision, something that had not been there previously and did not resemble a familiar object, a strange misshapen lump like something had sprouted through the wood of the table.

She put the milk away and closed the refrigerator, and frowned as her mind caught up to what her eyes had filed away.

She turned, slowly, and only then did the thing coalesce in front of her, and it was no wonder she had not recognized it at first, rent apart as it was, strings loose and curled at the ends where they had been coiled around the tuning pegs, neck cleaved messily in half, body warped and caved and jagged: her father's violin.

There was an ocean, and she was at the bottom of it. For a length of time she could not measure, the ocean was quiet, and she was alone and she was fine. After a time, there were some voices, high-pitched in worry, and she thought to console them, but she was at the bottom of an ocean and could not open her mouth.

Someone's hands were on her, and then something cool was pressed to her forehead, and one of the voices started up again, soothing and soft. Then it was quiet again, until the cool thing disappeared and there was a new voice, one which reached her through the water in her ears and pulled her up to the surface.

He had just begun work on the second movement when the knock came.

Unusual, but he ignored it; the neighbours ought to know by now not to come to his door. He sighed, lowered pen to paper again.

A knock, again, and harder this time.

"Please, Monsieur!"

A voice he knew well—but how had she found him?

He growled and dropped the pen and went to the door, leaving his face bare. Serves her right—let her scream—

Her face paled at the sight of him, but she did not cry out, only said, "You must come."

A splash of mud painted the side of her dress, and her hair had begun to come out of its austere chignon; colour high on her cheeks, he had never seen her so shaken. She stared, and he stared back, and there was a beat of silence, punctuated by her erratic breathing. Had she been running?

"What—?"

"There is no time," she said, "no time to explain—you must come, quickly."

Her urgency was palpable, and yet… he thought of the score sitting on his desk, the melody which he'd finally broken just this afternoon in a feverish scribble of ink. He folded his arms over his chest. "And why is it you came to me?"

Her eyes hardened. "It's Christine," she said.

Christine.

She must have seen his composure falter, for she grimaced and shoved past him into the flat. "Get your hat, Monsieur—"

"What has happened?"

"I cannot say, not now," she said lowly. "There was—I could not go to anyone else. There is a chance you might—but I must try—"

She was making little sense and she was wringing her hands and was altogether so unlike her normal self that he slowly felt himself suffused with a deep dread. Christine injured—Christine dead—

"Madame!" He caught her by the arm and shook her. "What has happened?"

She shook her head and wrenched from his grasp. "There is no time," she said again. "Come, hurry, we must go—"

She shoved his hat and overcoat into his arms and stalked out the door, and what could he do but follow?

It was raining lightly. She set off down the street, and for a moment he thought she'd run the entire distance between her flat and his before he noticed a cab idling by the sidewalk. He shoved the hat onto his head and the coat over his shoulders, and kept his face turned to the side and the hat-brim angled down as he folded himself into the cab.

The interior of the car was dark, but it was periodically illuminated with bright stripes of light from the lampposts as they passed by, and he watched as the flat line of Madame Giry's mouth tightened and, finally, disappeared entirely, her fingers locked together in her lap.

A faint ringing in his ears, and an intrusive parade of images when he closed his eyelids: Christine crying, Christine taken, Christine, hair matted and skin stained with blood —

She preceded him up the stairs to her flat, and he felt every click of her heels in his bones. She opened the door and ushered him inside.

"What is the meaning of this, Madame," he hissed, lifting the hat from his head. She gestured mutely toward the kitchen.

There was a woman on the kitchen floor, and she wore Christine's dress and looked very much like Christine but for the face and the eyes, and the eyes especially were striking, empty and shuttered.

His heart stopped, and how long had it been since that day at the opera house? Not long, he knew, barely a week at most, and yet it could have been years for how his eyes caught on her and stayed.

"We found her like this," he heard Madame Giry saying distantly, and then, "her father's violin."

He registered the presence of another—the younger Giry, backing away from Christine, clutching a damp towel. She left his eyesight and he forgot her.

The skin of his face itched, and this close to her, he felt the ghost of her lips on his lips, and he stepped into the kitchen and knelt beside her.

He hesitated, and then said, "Christine."

She blinked. Her head lay against the floor, and her hair clung wetly to her forehead where the towel had been. He reached out with trembling fingers to smooth her hair back, and he dared to cup his hand around the base of her head before he remembered himself and pulled away.

One of the Girys shifted behind him. Why had they brought him? He should not be here, he should not be witness to this, had spent months agonized and alone without her, and now, to touch her...

"Christine," he said again, not recognizing his own voice. He felt her breath against the bare skin of his hand. Her lips were pale and dry.

Her gaze shifted to the side slightly, and his breath caught, but her eyes slid unseeing past him. He could not bear to say her name again, but now he guessed at why he had been summoned, and he swallowed and reached out to graze his knuckles over her cheek. Soft, and warm, and he should not touch her, did not have the right—

A hand, clammy and cold, circled his wrist. The grip was loose but he was frozen all the same, and he watched as her eyes followed the line of his arm to his shoulder, and then up to his face—his face, uncovered and stark in the overhead light—he twisted his head to the side to hide it, and then her fingers pressed tighter into his skin and he dragged his eyes back to her face.

She was looking at him, and her eyes were clear.

"You," she said.


	6. Poco a Poco

She was running.

Running, because somewhere between the new year and now, she had found her strength only to lose it again. She had pleaded with God and her father for her life, and it had been given to her, but too late, and she had wasted _so much time_ on waiting and not sleeping and not thinking. In the end, what harm was running?

Like this, daylight extinguished, stumbling down the stairs of an apartment building that was not hers, she could almost imagine she was running toward her life, but the illusion was cracked and wrong, the running more like fleeing.

There was not much time. They would come to find her—he would for certain—was she never to be free of him? He would find her, would always find her, halfway across Paris, anywhere in Paris. Would she have to leave the city, to be rid of him?

(Did she want to be rid of him?)

She cleared the stairs and shoved through the front door, and inhaled so deeply she thought she might swallow the stars. The air was cool and refreshing, and it scoured the murk from her mind and allowed her to think more clearly, and still what she thought was _run_.

_The waves parted over her head. The voice, it was attached to a man with half a face, a man she knew, and she could not remember if she ought to be afraid or glad or angry at the sight of him, but his eyes were what she saw first, and they burned. His hand was on her face, and her hand was on his hand, and he was looking at her like—_

_"You," she said, and remembered. Was he real?_

_His expression flickered. She must have spoken the thought aloud._

_His tongue darted out to moisten his lips, and he choked on her name._

_Suddenly, his hand on her, soft and searing, was too much, and she shoved it away and said, "Don't touch me."_

_She did not know why she said it, knew only that something in her heart turned over startlingly when he touched her, and after so long any more of it might be fatal. But his breath tripped out harshly and his whole body, the taut, coiled frame of him, flinched away, and a spark of malice stirred within her. Something else, too, something soaring and frightening, thick in her lungs and throat. She breathed unsteadily around it. The anger felt safer._

She looked left: she had gone in that direction just hours ago, and there was a flare of shame when she thought of it. She would not go that way again. The street extended a little farther on her right, blocked off by a row of buildings.

Caged in, again—but where to run, anyway? Where had she thought to escape? Her flat was no longer an option, and the home she had shared with her father now belonged to some other family. There was nowhere else in Paris she could go, nowhere she felt safe.

Not even the opera house, once her sanctuary…

The image of the Palais Garnier flashed to the front of her mind and she imagined escaping to the Phantom's subterranean lair, hiding there for the rest of her life, haunting the place as he'd once done. Or did still—she did not know, could not be sure that he hadn't come here tonight straight from the bowels of the opera house.

Then, she thought of a graveyard in Perros, a hunk of dead stone and a pile of dead bones beneath it. Often, she had wished to lie there beside it, to stretch out on the ground and sleep and wait until she was absorbed into the earth.

She could not do so now. This was, perhaps, her lowest moment, even after three years of dying and loneliness and ecstasy and fear; and yet she could not find within herself that desire to join her father, only a confusing whirl of feeling rising in a resounding crescendo in her mind with every pulse of heart and breath of air.

_He had brought his hand up to cover himself, although it trembled and did not fully mask the ragged swell of his lip or the ruin of his cheekbone. His eyes had skittered away from her and she found she could take him in more easily because of it, and she rose partway from the floor to lean against the leg of the table and she looked at him, a hulking shadow, on his knees._

_Madame Giry's voice, muted-sounding and distant—oh, but she couldn't lift her eyes from him, the mussed tumble of his dark hair and the pallor of his skin, fingers like claws denting the fabric over his thighs—tension lined his shoulders and firmed the jagged slash of his mouth, and how strange it was to behold him in full light!_

_She had seen him in the half-dark and seen him illuminated by stage lights, if for the briefest of moments before the chaos had set in, but this was different…_

_But she watched him breathe and shake and then thought, perhaps not so different. The Girys' kitchen floor simply another kind of stage, another spectacle made out of him, and she wondered if she had ever seen him truly as he was._

_"Why?" she asked. She did not sound like herself, clipped and hoarse._

_He twitched at the sound, and his eyes did slide to hers then, for the second time tonight, and what tenderness there had been before—drawing her out of the drowning, anchoring her, clearing the haze of her grief—had fled and left behind a wild emptiness that widened his pupils and gave her the sense of an entirely different sort of drowning._

She still stood outside the Girys' building. If she did not move soon, and quickly, she would be found. Would he be the one to come after her? Or would he let her be this time, as he had said he would? Did she want to find out?

Turning in an aimless circle, she caught sight of the dying little flower-hedge along the perimeter of the building, and was reminded of the back alley onto which she'd looked the other day.

She ran.

The alley gave way to a parallel street, and she followed it until it was bisected by the rue de la Victoire. Here she stopped, and wondered again what her aim was, and she had just turned tentatively to the left when there was a rustle and a voice behind her.

"Good evening, Mademoiselle."

The voice, deep and low like it was meant only for her ears, a threat laced through it, and even as she froze, she knew it was not him. There was a bewildering flare of disappointment, and then a surge of renewed fear.

She turned back to the source of the voice. The figure of a man, the face inscrutable. He shifted slightly out of the shadow between buildings, and her heart flipped.

He wore a tan suit.

_He did not reply, only watched her, and she brought herself to standing, gripping the lip of the sink for balance._

_"Please go." She could not think with him looking at her, was barely even able to breathe—_

_He rose now too, seemed to take up the entire room, the murk of him spreading into the corners and battling with the overhead light. His hand, still raised to hide his face._

_"Please," she said again._

_"Gladly," he spat, "but an explanation is due, I think."_

_She shuddered to hear his voice again, and the muted rage there. The last time she had heard it, four months ago, deep underground and almost unbelievable to think of now, broken in anguish:_

Christine, I love you _._

_A voice she could not forget, screaming furious passionate sibilant. A voice she had thought she would not hear ever again but in dreams, swirling sinuous around her ears and twining around her heart._

_"I didn't want this," she replied. "I owe you nothing."_

"You," she said, for the second time that night.

Another step forward. Jaunty, and confident.

"Have we met, Mademoiselle?"

"What do you want?" God, she sounded so frightened. There was nothing, not even the sound of a passing car, and she was alone in the half-shadows with this man, about whom she had almost forgotten in the panic and deadness of the day.

The man's expression changed minutely, and a chill of dread numbed her fingertips. "Only to relay a message," he replied.

She shifted back a step, regretting it as his eyes tracked the movement, and she fought to steady her voice. "From whom?"

"No matter." Waving a careless hand, he advanced again, and she retreated again, and her back met with the brick of the alley wall. "The message itself is of greater consequence than is its provenance."

The words moved sluggishly through her ears to her brain, and he waited with condescending patience as she parsed his meaning through the thick fear clouding her mind.

"And," she said, "what is the message?"

He moved so quickly, had gone blurry around the edges with movement and she had realized too slowly, had not realized in time, and he struck her and that, too, she realized too slowly, did not feel the pain of it for some seconds after.

"I will repeat the message for you," he said, "so that you don't forget."

_The hand over his face jerked, and the fingers contracted into claws, brow puckered by the gouge of nails. A savage swoop in her stomach again; she should not take such vindication in his reaction, it was wrong, but this feeling… it crackled, and she understood that it was from a kind of power she had never held over him until now. Perhaps she had stolen it with her kiss, had pulled it from his mouth to hers and held it secret inside her all this time._

_"Do you think it was my choice to come?" he hissed. "I had left you be, I had—tried to forget you—"_

_"Yes, clearly!"_

_"That is enough," Madame said, striding forward into the kitchen._

_She had all but forgotten the Girys, and with Madame's abrupt reentry into her line of sight more colour and sound seeped in. She heard the erratic punch of her own breathing and worked to modulate it, saw the darkening of his gaze as he registered Madame's presence—he, too, it seemed, had obscured the rest of the world._

The third blow brought her to the ground, and loose gravel scraped against her knees and something wet dripped from her nose. Blood.

"Please," she said, "please—"

"Have you memorized it?" the man said, and she felt his fingers burrow and twist into her hair.

He forced her face up, kept pulling so that she had to stand, and then he unknotted his fingers from her and brought the back of his hand around.

She caught it before it hit her cheek, and it was as though the listless churn of her mind had sped and crystallized and there was an overabundance of sensation and perception: the rivulet of blood down her cheek, the shifting tendons of the man's wrist beneath her fingers, the dig of embedded gravel in her knee, the painful whistle of her breathing. The streetlamp at the corner had turned on, and she and this man just skirted its pool of light.

"Who are you," she said, but he did not answer, only yanked himself free and shoved her back against the brick.

A vice around her throat, his hand large enough almost to encase her neck, his face placid and composed, and she would perhaps have preferred to see the murder written on his face, rather than this eerie calmness.

She gasped something out, was not sure what it was, and pulled and wrenched at his grip and scratched her nails into the tender skin between his fingers. She felt the flesh between thumb and forefinger give way, and he cried out, grip loosening. She flung him away.

Now there was an expression, of anger and pain, and there was no time to run before he was on her again. This time she allowed him to thrust her against the wall, using it as a brace as she brought her knee up—he staggered forward, and she raked her nails across his face—a howl of pain—

And the slight advantage she had won, the precious seconds during which the seed of survival had taken root, was abruptly lost as he caught her hair again in his fist and slammed the back of his hand to her cheek.

The gravel gouged at her face, now, rather than her knees, and a flare of agony at her ribs as he delivered a kick there. Again, on the floor, prone and helpless, although there was no drowning this time, still the harrowing alertness.

The only sound the slide of loose rock beneath the man's boot as he stepped back. She could not see him in the dark, not with the lamp-light so out of reach, and she wondered if he would leave her here. She would have to get up.

_"How could you bring him here—"_

_"I had no choice," Madame said brusquely, and turned to their visitor. "Monsieur, we are afraid someone is targeting Christine." And she told him, in a voice only barely shaking, of the breaking in and of_ Salome _and all the rest._

_She watched as his spine gradually tightened until he was holding himself so rigid it seemed he might snap, and by the time Madame had finished, a thunderous look had stolen across his face._

_His jaw worked, and when he spoke, deep and dark, there was a thrill down her spine, terror and something else she did not want to define. "You must know this changes everything," he said. "I cannot just disappear back into the night knowing this."_

_Of course he could not; even now, he was taking some kind of ownership over her, as though he were still her teacher._

_"And what is it you plan to do?" she asked. "Will you haunt the man responsible? Or will you simply garrote him and be done with it?"_

_She could not watch this time as he staggered back a step or flinched or reacted in some piteous way to her cruelty, as he always had, as though she had cut down to his soul and bared it to the light._

He came into view finally, first his boots and then his knee as he knelt by her head. His breath stirred the hair over her face, and then he said, "Moreau sends his regards."

She did not know what else he would have done, if he would have struck her again or simply left her there, but as soon as the man rose to his feet there was a riot of action, the sound of a second pair of footfalls where before there had only been silence, followed by the thud of contact between two bodies. The man grunted, in surprise or pain she could not be sure, and then there was a smack and she knew without looking that his head had hit the ground.

His attacker moved so silently, and there was no doubt as to who it was—she had not gone far, he had found her so easily—and would he kill this man?

The thought did not disturb her as it should, but still there was some disgust, at herself and at him, and she tried to raise herself to tell him—something. Her palm skidded over the ground and found purchase, and she heaved herself up onto her elbows. A piteous noise escaped her—her head, pain like she'd never known, and her ribs, too, and there was blood dripping over the back of her hand.

The man's grunting abruptly ceased.

Another pair of boots in front of her, another knee, and then a hand extended, knuckles scraped and newly bloody. The hand halted just inches from her, and she knew it was him, his death-touched hand, she _knew_ , and she moved toward him anyway. Her ribs slid on the uneven pavement, and she crumpled.

That hand on her elbow, then sliding across her back to curl around her waist, below her ribs. She was being lifted, and the world swayed, and she closed her eyes until she had stopped moving.

She was in his arms, and they were strong but they trembled. He held her to his chest, and he knelt over her, shoulders rounded. She grasped at his forearm, intending to throw him off, still to wound him, but her fingers moved independently of her will, tightening and holding and soon she clutched at him as tightly as he did her.

"Christine—" Ragged, ragged, the lancing pain in his voice more than she could bear.

Words were not coming, not yet, and she made another sound and he drew her in tighter. His heart, under her head, fast and wild. _So he has a heart_ , she thought.

"Is—is he dead?" she asked, when she could speak.

He stiffened, and said, "Not yet."

She heard the promise in his words, and despite the pain she craned her head up and caught his eyes. She could not make out his face in the gloom, but his eyes were bright.

_It was some parody of a standoff, both of them at either end of the kitchen, watching each other warily, neither willing to make the first move. He was different; months ago, he would have pleaded and screamed in equal measure, mercurial and desperate. Now he looked on as she drank him in, angry and almost fearful, still shielding himself, and he waited for her to speak._

_He knew nothing of people, she thought, knew only the dark parts of them, the obsession and avarice and hatred of people. How had she done it, that night? How had she embraced him, held him, given him compassion? To do so now felt like an unendurable concession._

_Still he waited, and still she searched fruitlessly for something to say. He knew it all, now, and she couldn't be certain that he would not whisk her away again. Different, but not a man entirely._

"What has he done to you?" he asked. His voice shook. There was the rage again. She was still caught on his eyes.

"My ribs," she said, and his grip immediately eased. "And—my head."

"You're bleeding," he said. He freed a hand and ghosted it over her cheek, where the blood must have run from her nose. He did not touch her there.

"Don't kill him," she said, and he blinked at the non sequitur before his eyes narrowed. Before he could argue, she continued: "He told me something. He had a message. He said, 'Moreau sends his regards.'"

A pause, and then he said, "Can you stand?"

She did, on her own, and she kept a hand braced on the wall rather than allowing him to assist her. He unfolded himself from his kneel, a dark shadow beside her, and stalked over to where he'd left her attacker.

The man lay a few feet away, on his back. She would have thought him dead. The light cast from the streetlamp was enough to illuminate the new, crooked angle of his nose.

"Who is it you work for?" he said. When the man did not answer, only groaned, he put his boot to his chest and applied pressure. "Answer me, or you will regret it."

The man only hacked out a cough.

She drew nearer, legs steady enough, and though she did not risk touching him—did not trust him, did not trust herself when it came to him—she let her hand rest inches from his elbow. His mouth tightened.

"You still would not have me kill him?" he asked, pressing down harder. "After what he has done to you?"

"You've killed enough in my name," she said. "And I want to know what he knows."

On the ground, the man coughed, his mouth outlined in red. His hand convulsed where it lay on his chest, fingers clawing and straightening and clawing again.

"I'll tell you," he said. "Listen closely: _l'angelo si accosta, bacia, e vi bacia la morte._ _Corpo di moribonda è il corpo mio_."

It all happened too quickly, and she was still caught up on what he had just said, but one moment he was staring up at them in defiance and the next, he was grinding his teeth and writhing and his face was reddening and then he had gone still, the stillness somehow more shocking than the manic motions from before.

_She remembered screams, and a hunk of wrought gold and crystal falling to the stage like a meteor._

_"I didn't tell anyone," she found herself saying. "I said nothing to the police. I thought—I thought maybe you were dead."_

_Something in his eyes changed. She pressed her lips together to keep more words from spilling out._

_"Every second since you left, I have died," he said, and she turned away._

_"I can't look at you," she muttered, and shouldered past Madame into the hall._

_Meg was hovering there, nervous, and she led the way to her bedroom in silence._

_She heard the hush of voices from the kitchen: he and Madame, discussing her._

_"Meg," she said, "will you cover for me?"_

Her shadow swooped down and clamped his hands around the man's jaw and opened his mouth.

"A fucking cyanide pill," he spat.

"What?" she said. "He—killed himself?"

She felt foolish for asking, had known intuitively when he had stopped moving, but hearing it aloud shocked her. Who was this man, whose purpose had been to convey a cryptic message and take his own life?

Her legs were less steady now, and he seemed to notice it, for he stepped off the dead man and held his hand out to her.

When she looked up, she found his face lit brightly by the lamp-light, the twisted flesh of the right side more monstrous, distorted further by the light's shadows. She knew the moment he realized, for he withdrew his hand and clapped it back over the deformity.

"Stop it," she said, her ears ringing. "It was never about your face."

He stared at her with an expression she could not place, and his hand spasmed over his face but he did not remove it.

She found the word for it: incredulity.

He followed her back to the Girys' building, close enough she could hear his breaths and, she imagined, the pacing of his heart, close enough that he could catch her if she fell. She did not fall. They left the dead man where he lay.

* * *

He slept on the sofa.

They had come in the door and Madame had been upon them immediately, the flint of her eyes dampening at the dried blood and mottled bruising. She had soaked a cloth in warm water, cleaned the blood from Christine's face and hands. It had stained her dress, and there was likely little hope for the garment. She wanted to burn it anyway.

He had stood in the corner, oozing shadows.

"Where is Meg?" she had thought to ask.

Madame's mouth had twisted. "In her room, having a conniption. I am not impressed at her involvement in your flight, Christine—and I am appalled that you would think it wise to run off again. Were you thinking at all?"

The shame beat at her chest. "I couldn't breathe here," she had said. "I'm sorry—after all you've done for me—"

The woman did not soften, but her shoulders had rounded slightly. "I can't think what to do with you."

At some point, Madame had gone into the hall and returned clutching a length of linen, which she gave to the man in the corner. Christine watched as he unwound it and fastened it around his head: a makeshift mask.

After, Madame had looked at her expectantly, and she had begun with the second sneaking out, told her of the man and his message, and she did not describe the blows, could not describe them—they spoke for themselves, fresh on her face and staining her dress—and she lost the thread of what she was saying when she heard the rumble of anger behind her.

When she came to the part with the death, she could not continue, and she let her eyes slip shut as he picked up the story, tone dispassionate on the surface but roiling with tension.

"His last words," he had muttered, "Italian: 'The angel approaches with a kiss, and the Death is kissing you. My body is a dying body.'"

An ugly silence followed, before he took up the story again.

"You did not move the body?" Madame had said sharply, when he was done. "Fool—what if someone has stumbled upon it? Alerted the police?"

"The body was not my priority—"

"You never have been much good with the intricacies of corpse-disposal," Madame had said.

"You dare—"

"Stop, please." Hoarse, like she was losing her voice.

They had tabled the stony glares and words like knives, and Madame had sent her to Meg's room with a promise to contact her enigmatic investigator tomorrow morning. She had gone, longing for the mindlessness of sleep.

Now it was three in the morning, and she had woken to the red face of a dying man and come out of Meg's room for a glass of water.

And he was sleeping on the sofa.

There was a pile of sheets on the floor, and he lay stretched out on the sofa, the wiry length of him too long for it. She was standing in the hall, just standing and watching him—he was not even moving, hardly breathing, it seemed, but she watched him like she would a performance at the opera house.

The curtains were drawn tight shut, and there was no wedge of moonlight to highlight his face, but she imagined him in repose, eyes closed and jaw unclenched. Her mind filled in the details she'd missed earlier, the dark suit, casual and wrinkled, the lines of black on his fingers—ink, probably. Perhaps he still composed.

She still imagined him as a bodiless voice, existing only in her mind; to be so confronted with his humanity, and in so banal a setting, threatened to tip her over the edge like nothing else quite had tonight. That above all else worried her—how strong still was his hold on her, that his presence struck her like the weight of a man's death could not?

"Christine," he breathed, and she was not sure if he was awake or dreaming but she left after that, curled up beside Meg and waited for the sun.


	7. Fermata

He woke to a blue-grey dawn on the edge of a beautiful dream, to an unfamiliar room and the familiar yearning tug in his chest for Christine.

Christine, who in his dream had come to him swathed in moonlight, had stood behind him silent and watchful but had fled at the sound of her name on his lips.

Christine, only a few walls separating them, knees scraped, frightened and tired. And he, in a position he could never have expected—could it have been mere hours ago that Madame Giry had come to his door and begged his help, hours ago that Christine had been insensible on the floor and then a flurry of anger and resentment and sorrow?

Hours ago, that she had disappeared again and his mind had been transported to those other times she had run from him. In his fear, he had gone after her…

_L'angelo si accosta, bacia, e vi bacia la morte. Corpo di moribonda è il corpo mio._

Something jumped, deep in his memory. It was from an opera, he knew this...

There was a squeak of floorboards in the hall, and he shot to his feet, instinctively moving to straighten his jacket before remembering he'd shucked it last night to use as a pillow. Long fingers fiddled anxiously with his cufflinks but the woman who appeared in the doorway was not Christine.

"Monsieur," Meg Giry said, chin high, the image of her mother.

He nodded, feeling every inch of the makeshift linen mask rasp against his face. The flimsy thing only added to his visceral discomfort.

God, he needed to leave this house, to leave her behind as he'd promised… but that was becoming harder and harder to do with every passing moment, with every heartbeat a clamouring reminder of her proximity.

"I have something of yours," the girl said without preamble, dark eyes glinting with apprehension. "And I have conditions, if you want it back."

He stiffened. "What could you possibly have that belongs to me?"

Her brows drew together as if in defiance, and she disappeared back into the hall for a moment before returning with something wrapped in a towel.

A flick of her wrist and the towel fell away, and there in her small brown fist was his half-mask.

The sight of it drove the air from his lungs and set off a melody in his head, of pounding organ and descending semitones.

"How did you get this?" he demanded.

She ignored the question. "Christine didn't sleep last night," she said. "She made a good show of it, for my sake, but I knew she wasn't sleeping. She's hardly slept in weeks."

His hands fisted at his sides. "And what of it?"

"She has been through too much. And too much of her pain has been caused by you." Her eyes hardened, and she held up the mask, knuckles white from clutching it hard. "So you're going to fix this for her—I don't care how, but you will, or else I swear I'll throw this thing in the Seine."

"You overestimate my attachment to it," he said. "I can easily procure another."

She looked at his face, and then her baleful gaze swept down to the rest of him, and she said, "You don't fool me. Maman used to tell the most fantastical stories of you, to make me behave, but I was never scared. I wanted to be like you, to know the bones of the opera house like they were my own."

She grimaced, and the hand holding the mask aloft dropped to her side. "I don't know what you are, or what you want, but my mother brought you here for a reason. You—you love Christine, don't you?"

She was waiting for an answer, and he groped in the dark for his voice.

"Yes," he rasped.

A stiff nod, the barest drop of her shoulders. "So do I. And if you love her half as much as I do, you want to see her safe. Can I trust you?"

He was dizzy, his lungs void of air, and this diminutive slip of a girl stared at his face with such steely determination that he was powerless to deny her.

His mouth shaped the words, and he spoke them into being: "Trust me."

He was alone again, the white mask glowering at him from the sofa. He had not touched it, had backed away when Meg Giry had held it out for him to take, and she had left it there and gone. The subtle blush-bloom of pink along the cheekbone, the rakish curl of brow, the porcelain-pale veneer: it was in remarkable condition, and he marvelled again at the quiet audacity of the girl. Where and how had it come into her possession?

One step forward, and another and another until his knees met the edge of the sofa. With shaking hand he palmed the mask, the other hand tearing away the linen wound around his head, and a thorny frisson ran him through when it was properly seated on his face.

The Phantom once more.

"I never thought I'd see that again."

He whirled around: Christine, barefoot, wrapped in a dressing gown, hair beautifully sleep-mussed. Eyes wide.

"I assumed—when you came, last night, I thought—well, you were uncovered…"

"Yes," he said, a beat too late, after the air between them had grown stale, "yes, I had… left it behind." That night.

He offered no explanation for the mask's sudden reappearance. If the Giry girl had kept this secret from her friend, he would not spoil it.

Christine's eyes flicked about the room as though she was observing it for the first time, and her gaze would periodically return to him, and oh, he felt naked without his jacket, his hat, but there was the mask now, at least, though it was a small comfort.

The silence boomed and crashed, a thousand branch-beats of the air, never ending radio static.

She was the one to break it. "Thank you," she said, brows drawn together as though each syllable pained her.

Not even eight o'clock and he was rendered speechless for the second time. She noticed, perhaps, because she flushed slightly and shifted on her feet and elaborated: "You helped me—saved me—yesterday."

Anything for you, he almost said.

I love you, he could not say.

"Samir Ayari," he said instead.

"I'm sorry?"

He stalled a moment, trying to trace this unexpected train of thought back to its origin. "An old friend," he said, "Monsieur Samir Ayari." Yes, this might work: might keep Christine safe, might satisfy his tenuous agreement with Meg Giry. Would not absolve him in her eyes, but then, nothing possibly could. "Retired now, but his particular skillset might prove valuable—"

"Valuable to what?" she asked, brows still puckered in confusion.

"Your safety is paramount," he said, conscious of but powerless against the undercurrent of desperation that laced his words. "I need"—he cleared his throat—"you must be safe."

"Safe," she echoed, rolling the word around in her mouth as though searching its taste. Her lips twisted in contempt. "After last night, that word has lost meaning to me."

"It will never happen again," he said, the pronouncement falling from his lips like an oath.

Her eyes burned a path across his face, then dropped, her mouth flattening into a line. She nodded once, slightly, and backed out of the room until he was alone again. The impression of her, standing only feet away, was seared into his retinas.

What a thing he had done… what damage he had wrought! Her spirit, the light in her eyes—he had once thought it inextinguishable, but her hollow-eyed stare was undeniably a product of his schemes and manipulations. When once the tension between them had thrilled, it now sat leaden in his stomach.

He had known that Don Juan Triumphant would change things between them irrevocably, had anticipated it: she, his muse, willing and curious and inventive; and he, doting and whole, finally, for the first time. In retrospect, his plans had been animated by little more than a child's fantasy.

And they had come perilously close to destroying her.

After it all, the thought of what his madness had bred would make his head pound and his chest tighten, and drive him almost to the brink of something dark and desperate, and so he would suppress it. Drown himself in music and fantasies. Languish like some twisted Romantic hero. But shame twisted restless in his gut, and he knew he could not hope to evade it much longer.

* * *

This was all so familiar, the sudden death of a man and surrounding it, music and mystery and him. But her life couldn't possibly fall further apart after last night, which seemed even in the lucid light of day to have been the worst of her nights…

And this man who was not a man, at the centre of it all. He, all wrapped up in and inseparable from her trauma, although this time not the architect of it. How to conceive of him now? She could hardly put her mind to him at all without that heart-twisting combination of anger and longing.

She was looking through the closet for something to wear, shuffling through brightly coloured frocks, but she saw only frightening vignettes from last night: the moment that man had stepped into the light, stealing her breath; falling to the ground, blood dripping stickily to her fingers; the Phantom, cradling her in his arms.

Most of all, the other man's dying and dead face, teeth bared and eyes empty. Soulless.

The feeling was all at once that it had not happened, could not possibly have happened, and that it was somehow still happening and would never stop, and she would be frozen and immobile on the precipice of her memory.

She had woken this morning from a shallow sleep, every muscle in her body urging her up, to stand and go to the living room, to him, to do… what? Cry, scream, hurt. Kiss.

She had closed her eyes again at that thought, squeezed them shut against the memory of that night, still so vivid, him trembling against her.

Finally, she had gone to him, more from the desire to wipe her mind clean than anything else, and he did not rage, and she did not cry or scream or hurt him or kiss him. He had stared at her, watched her closely like she would dissipate at any moment.

She had been struck anew by how strange he looked in the world outside the opera house, stranger still illuminated by daylight. Daylight, in his estimation cold and unfeeling, somehow seemed to move around him sluggishly and shade his features, as though there was something in him that naturally repelled it.

She was left with impressions, vivid in her mind whenever she tore her eyes away: the cut of his cheekbone, the sweep of dark eyelashes, the restless fingers. The curve of his mouth. That had been enough to send her fleeing.

After she had left him in the parlour, Christine had gone to fetch the Girys. Now, some bare minutes later, they were the four of them assembled in a strange configuration in which the three women had arranged themselves in a tight semicircle near the door, and he stood tense across the room, as though he was to be the subject of an interrogation.

"Christine has informed me of your intent to make contact with a… prior associate," Madame Giry said.

He nodded stiffly. "He has many resources at his disposal, which I intend to make use of to investigate this threat."

His eyes fell to Christine, for the briefest of moments, and heat flared unbidden to her cheeks.

Smoothing a hand over his jacket, he shifted his gaze to Madame Giry. When next he spoke, it was stiff and formal, as though he had erected some mental barrier. "I thank you for your hospitality, Madame. Rest assured that I will do everything in my power to ensure Christine's safety. And… you will not hear from me again."

The moment stretched uncomfortably until Madame Giry, inclining her head in acquiescence, backed out of the room. Meg was lingering, brows pinched together in concern, and Christine realized she was waiting for her, so as not to leave her alone with him.

A brief and silent argument took place between them, and Meg finally slouched off in defeat, tossing a glare over her shoulder that promised a reprisal.

In truth, she could not say why she had stayed, only knew that this parting, cold and abrupt, sat wrong in her stomach. He had always been fire and passion and temper: it was unnatural, this stillness, this sobriety. She had witnessed it before, after she had returned his mask that first night: a sudden, almost manic shift in emotion.

In a way, her instinct for provocation was a fitting counterpoint.

She edged closer, knowing only that she could not let him leave like this, on these terms. So much of their relationship, she realized, had been dictated by him; if she was never to see him again, she could finally liberate the truths that had been pressing against her lips, the thoughts and dizzying contradictions that had been accumulating ever since he had sent her away.

"You once told me there was a man behind the monster," she said.

All he did was nod, and watch her warily.

"You have done truly monstrous things," she continued, and her gaze dropped from his for a moment before she forced herself to meet his eyes again. "Abhorrent things. But… I don't believe that you are a monster."

"Then you are a fool," he snapped.

"There is goodness still in you," she pressed, and as she said it she found that she believed it. "Or there is space for it, at least. Denying it the chance to grow is what makes you a monster."

A muscle in his jaw jumped, and he turned away, raking an agitated hand through his hair.

"You hanged Buquet," she said, bold and incongruous in the still parlour, "and you laughed."

He jerked to a stop.

"And you murdered Piangi."

"Yes." Barely a whisper.

"What you did to  _me_ —"

"Christine, please—"

He was breathing heavily, and his fingers had gone shaking to his cufflinks, rolling and twisting them. One worked its way loose and fell to the floor.

Her eyes stung. She waited.

**"** What would you have me do **?"**  he said, imploring.

"You can try to atone for it. For all of it. You can show me your remorse, prove to me that you have learned—"

"Believe me, there is nothing I do not regret—"

She laughed, and he wrenched back as though the sound had glanced across him like a whip. "Regret is not the same." He grasped fruitlessly for words, and her brows knit together in disbelief. "Tell me that you feel guilt," she said, "or—or contrition, anything—"

"You want my guilt?" he rasped, pounding a fist over his heart. "My contrition? Take it, then, all of it, because it consumes me!"

This was the crux of it, she realized: his nascent sense of self, of morality, which she had unintentionally and so carelessly fed, forcing him to confront his malefactions.

"I can't bear it for you," she said, "and I won't. This burden, this anguish: you caused it." Squaring her shoulders with a confidence she did not feel, she said, "I won't be held captive anymore, not by your guilt and not by your desires."

She had never been so bold to him, not even in those final aching moments underground when she had released a year's worth of anger and betrayal and heartbreak, and even then he had been too far gone, too enraged and frantic to hear her.

Here it was just the two of them, bathed in the reticent sunlight of early morning, the blood roaring in her ears but everything else so quiet.

He had stilled at her words, though his chest rose and fell in  _staccato_  bursts. She could not read his expression—she had never learned how—and he loomed over her, inscrutable but for his eyes, which roiled with some nameless emotion.

Finally, he spoke: "Then, let me do this, Christine—I will not seek absolution from you, but let me do this, and you will never see me again. I swear it."

That was what she wanted: to be free of him, of the influence and the intoxication of him. Without him, she could learn to be whole. The part of her heart that beat for him, that spread his music through her body like blood, she would tear it out and heal herself. She would.

Why, then, did the thought of him, gone from her life forever, make her chest constrict?

She nodded, and his mouth tightened at the tacit confirmation. "How do I know I can trust you?"

He spread his palms. "Do you have a choice?"

Ironic, that he spoke of choice… If life was a series of choices made, had she ever truly lived? What decisions had she made for herself? The men in her life had ruled it for her, moved her like a chess piece across a board of their own making, obfuscating and changing the rules when it suited them. Her father, her angel, her employers, even. And Raoul.

She had studied music to keep a piece of her father alive. She had been thrust into the spotlight prematurely. She had given her soul for music, whatever sense of self she had garnered eroded, and she had entrusted her heart to a man with the best intentions. It was all broken now, irreparably, and still she could not make sense of what she had been left with. A thread, hopelessly gnarled, that she could not untangle, that she feared might snap if she worked at it too hard.

But if this was the hand that fate had dealt her, should she not play it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really fought with myself over Christine's characterization in this chapter, but then I reminded myself that she has hella PTSD so I stand by it. Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts! I'll do my best to update soon. ;)


	8. Vivace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New POV introduced, and some forward movement!

The man cut easily through the pedestrian traffic clogging the intersection of Provence and le Peletier, ducking into a coffee shop on the corner. Almost empty, unusual for a comparatively clean-looking café at this hour. Prosaic snapshots of famous landmarks lined the close walls, a lopsided sign proclaimed the restroom out of order, and a low-fi stereo spat out uneven intervals of static and Annie Philippe.

The man approached the counter, where a single employee stood slouched but watchful.

" _Café crème_ , please."

"Machine's broken," the employee grunted.

"What a shame," the man said. "Tea, then."

The employee jerked his head as though flicking away an errant fly and went off to prepare the tea. When he returned the man paid and, armed with rose-patterned cup and saucer, sat at a table nearest the window.

The tea went down like yesterday's dishwater, but the man was not here for the drink: in the hollow space between cup and saucer lay a small, thin key.

He waited ten minutes, absently observing the quotidian chaos of rue Provence, then got up, chair scraping on the floor, and deposited the cup and saucer on the counter. The employee's gaze tracked his departure from the shop.

A plain door was set behind a metal grille to the direct right of the shop, and, unnoticed by passersby—for the man was old hand at going about his business unobserved—he swiftly swung open the grille and unlocked the door and set up the steep set of stairs just inside. There was a door of frosted glass at the top, etched with elegant lettering that read _Librairie Hugo_.

A chime sounded when he pushed through the door, echoing faintly in the low-ceilinged cavities and alcoves of the bookshop. The scents of old glue and untold stories met his nose, and he inhaled deeply. There was another scent, too, lacing the air: deeper, masculine and spiced.

"Ah, Monsieur Ayari," came a voice.

The man let a fraction of his guard slip down. "Agent."

A short man, wiry, hair curling over his forehead. "You'll find the text you requested in the Reading Room."

"Thanks for this," he muttered. "I owe you a favour."

"Bring me a coffee next time," the other man said, warm eyes crinkling. "But not that swill from downstairs."

Monsieur Ayari grinned in wry agreement, and crossed the little shop. He found himself pausing, hand curled round the doorknob, before entering; somehow, improbably, on the other side of that door...

He swung it open.

Erik.

The door shut quietly behind him, quietly because if the agent outside had somehow not known who it was waiting here so patiently, legs crossed and hands linked on the table, he would not be the one to give it away.

"This is a dangerous game you're playing," Samir hissed.

The other man spread his hands. "But what fun would the game be, without a little danger?"

"I'm shocked that you even managed to get past Darius, nevermind whatever you had to do to plant the key—"

Erik's eyes flicked to the room's only window, which overlooked a greying alley. "Does it matter how I did it? I got you here, didn't I?"

"Yes, and let me reiterate my initial statement: you are in _danger_ , Erik."

What he did not say: _I am glad to see you alive_.

What he did not want to think: _your freedom has made a treasonous man of me_.

Erik leaned forward, the motion bringing his face more acutely into the light. Samir's heart skipped a beat to see the white half mask in place again—although he felt, deep in his stomach in a dark place of shame, relief that the deformity was concealed.

"I'm always in danger, Samir," Erik said softly. "But I find myself in a situation in which others, innocents, have become implicated in my affairs."

"And…?"

He exhaled sharply. "And it is unacceptable. Come, Samir, I do in fact possess some approximation of a conscience."

Samir considered this for a moment. "Choose new phrases next time," he finally said. "The French have no idea how to brew a proper cup of tea."

The other man's face twisted in a smirk. Samir sighed loudly. "And, of course, you've heard me opine endlessly on the subject of weak tea. Well played, my friend, although one does wonder whether this trick of yours might make me less amenable to any requests you might have for me." His brow raised. "That is why you're here, isn't it?"

The smirk vanished, although Samir would never flatter himself to imagine the new expression was anything resembling abashment. "As it stands… yes, I do need your help," the man returned, and he winced as though the words were knives in his mouth.

"What exactly would that entail?" Erik was silent a moment, so he sharpened his tone: "Do take care to remember that I don't have all the resources of the Service at my disposal. And _if_ I agree to your requests, this needs to be kept between us."

"I don't know whom you would expect me to confide in," Erik muttered sourly.

Samir coughed. "Well, let's hear it, then," he said, settling in. "What fresh horror have you brought upon yourself?"

* * *

He could not help wondering—at the door with his hat, sharing a final heady glance with Christine, cutting through rot-laced back alleys—if his existence was meant to be a series of briefly euphoric, delirious episodes bracketed by deep darkness and misery. Walking away from Christine not once but twice, ice in his veins and the feeling that destiny had looked him over and laughed. Perhaps he was damned, to have come so close to her again only to have her so cruelly severed from him.

This would never abate, he knew, this need to be close to her, a need which ran far deeper than simple desire. It burned and tormented and he was never without it.

The animation in her eyes, the doubt and hurt as she castigated him, spoke words into being as passionately as she had once sung arias. And then he wondered, did she still sing? Foolishly, selfishly, he wondered if perhaps her inspiration had run as dry as had his.

He dismissed the thought. She was not like him.

Perhaps the realization that she truly hated him, had been betrayed by him and held him responsible for her misery and misfortune ought to have freed him from her. But he was as tethered to her as he had always been, since her voice had first settled in his bones.

The sun slanted hard across his face as he strode between streets, and he pulled the brim of his hat and angled his face down so that the unnatural part of him remained in shadow. The exposed skin of his hands prickled from the sun-glare, the pull of his jacket over his shoulders abruptly tight, and for a vivid moment he wished for the solitary damp dark of the underground.

Only a moment, and then the memories returned and the force of remembering brought him back to himself. Sweating and breathing hard and blessedly close to his flat. He longed for the quiescence of his most recent self, the brooding composer, unspoiled by greed and obsession, dedicated only to the music in his mind.

Up the rusted fire escape, windows empty or curtains drawn—no witnesses, and he damned the sun over and over—and pulling up the unlocked window-sash, rolling into the flat.

Quiet. Still. Pen and ink and staff paper where he had left it, splayed madly over the desk.

The hat and jacket came off, and then he began to pace across the worn floorboards.

_L'angelo si accosta, bacia, e vi bacia la morte. Corpo di moribonda è il corpo mio._

He reached out, sought the tendrils of melody fused to the words, and traced the song—the aria—from end to beginning.

That was it: "La mamma morta."

_Andrea Chénier._

Two operas, then. Strauss, a German, and Giordano, Italian. Superficially, little to relate the two… Aside from the twin themes of death. Suffering.

In one, the tragic death of a daughter, beside herself from the loss of her lover. In the other, burning and carnage and dying.

Presages of agony and disaster.

A rather unsubtle message, he mused, combing a hand through his hair. But enough to frighten a young girl.

No… innocent, perhaps, but she was more woman than girl, clear in her posture and her intellect and the way she had traded barbs with him just this morning, when before as his student she had more often than not deferred to his bouts of temper.

Again his thoughts came to her, the her of this morning: the frayed curls of her hair no less beautiful than when done up in ringlets, robe drawn tight, mouth expressive. Eyes afire. How he wished to have stayed, and learned the new edges of her.

Her words had shocked him, yes, with their boldness; he would have called them uncharacteristic, had an unusual, ephemeral moment of empathy not intruded: he in his selfishness and hunger and power had never allowed her to be anything but what he wanted, anything but an instrument, a golden conduit for his music.

But perhaps that, too, was not right… she _had_ been more, everything more, every fierce and gentle thing and he had striven to dim that fundamental part of her. If there was anything he had learned from those last moments with her, it was that she could not be reduced to a rationalized form.

His head ached, and he wished for a drink. But there was nothing here with which to drown himself but music, and that would bring him no solace tonight.

He would keep his word. She would be safe, and would not suffer him again.

There would be no hope for her renewed affection, but what would he not do, for her?

* * *

Samir passed a hand over his mouth. Sat silent, contemplative.

"Is it too much to ask for you to arrange to meet with me simply because you miss me?" he finally said, weakly.

Erik chuckled, and it too was a weak thing. "Would that I could. Trouble and discord seem to dog my footsteps, Samir."

"This girl," he said. "Mademoiselle Daaé."

The long fingers of Erik's left hand flexed and curled into a fist. "Yes."

"You would risk everything to protect her." It was not a question.

"Yes."

"Why?"

Erik's mouth opened, then closed just as swiftly. His gaze had centred on the obsidian ring he wore. He had begun twisting it absently round his finger. "She is…" he huffed a breath. The next words were delivered deliberate and careful: "She is the music."

A simple pronouncement, nonsense to those untrained in interpreting the spaces between Erik's words.

Samir had guessed, certainly, but this still reverence shocked him. Had he ever believed Erik capable of such tender certainty?

"I see," he said slowly, although in truth much remained to be illuminated. "And you want—what? A protection detail? Perhaps a task force? You know this is beyond my capabilities—"

Erik's hand cut through the air. "Again," he growled, "you remind me, needlessly, of your own impotence. I did not come here to ask that you move mountains, old man! I want"—and here his mouth tightened—"I _need_ your word that she will be safe."

Scrubbing at his short beard, Samir thought quickly. "Despite what I said, I may be able to cobble together a detail," he offered grudgingly. "Small and discreet. Men I—you—can trust."

A measure of tension leached from the other man's frame like a wave receding from shore. "I know nothing of the man behind this," he muttered. "It will have to be enough to know whether she is still being followed."

"There is a limit to what these men will do," Samir warned. "If there is evidence of it, you must know I cannot expect them to intervene."

A clipped nod. "I will do what is necessary. Not the first time I have been prevailed upon to do the dirty work, as it were."

Something shifted in the region of Samir's chest, a small thing but urgent and deep-rooted.

"Erik…" he began, unsure of what words to shape.

The man's unmasked eye glittered. "You don't mean to offer some insincere condolence, do you, Ayari? I would urge you to reconsider."

The deliberate, epithetic invocation of his surname did not escape Samir. How was it, he mused, that this man, this inconvenient penumbral hulk of a creature, was at once so mired in emotion and yet so resistant to it?

"As you wish, Erik," he said only.

They avoided each other's gazes in tension-thick silence until Erik sighed and said, "I… thank you for coming to me. Putting yourself at risk. For me. It means… more than you know."

You fool, Samir thought, and wasn't that why he could never stay away, could not say no? Could never rest easy. More than feeling responsible for the man, more than friendship forged on a battleground, and every time he thought he had reached his limit Erik would relent and it was barely enough but still it was, somehow.

Erik had retreated into himself, eyes distant, twisting the ring over and over round his finger.

"He was not surprised to see me," he said slowly. "The dead man. There was fear… revulsion… in his eyes, yes, but no surprise. He knew who I was, and he expected me to be drawn into this."

"What exactly are you saying?"

"Christine—Mademoiselle Daaé—was never the true target of this plot. Bait, perhaps, and"—he grimaced—"dangerously effective bait at that. Samir, I have enough reason to believe that I am the ultimate target of this man's terror."

Samir's mouth pulled into a deep frown. "Can you not think of any person who might be behind this? Someone with a vendetta?"

"That is not the trouble," Erik said. "The trouble is thinking of someone who does _not_."

"And this man, this Moreau… a code name, perhaps?"

"Likely. I do not recall dealing with any man with that name."

"An old acquaintance? Military?"

He scowled but did not deny the possibility.

"But then what will you do?"

Erik's answer was ready. "I will investigate. I will go to the source, and choke the weed before it spreads."

"How do you—"

" _Salomé_ ," he said grimly. " _Andrea Chénier._ He has given me two clues."

"Hardly clues," Samir scoffed. "How do you expect to make any progress with two operas and a surname?"

Erik gave him a look that might have meant, _I am the Opera Ghost._

"Do you so quickly forget all the time you spent underground, isolated from human contact?"

"I assure you, neither my intellect nor my instincts have been dulled by my sojourn in the bowels of the opera house."

Samir had learned rather quickly that Erik's deflections were not easily circumvented, and chose this time not to press, although he doubted rather strongly that Erik's old wartime contacts were still active.

"If that is all…"

Erik seemed to have unilaterally decided that the meeting had reached its conclusion, as he turned to the window, from which it seemed he was intent on making his exit. He had raised the sash and braced his arm on the sill when Samir spoke again, one thread still loose.

"But what of the girl, Erik?"

He paused. "What of her?"

"You intend to leave her in the dark? Does she know anything of what you are planning?"

His silence was answer enough.

"Erik, you cannot believe she would—would let it go like this, after what she has survived—"

"I will not fail her again," he rasped, back still turned. "What she has done for me… my debt to her is incalculable. And the farther away I am, the better for her."

"Even if it means your end?"

Erik barely hesitated: "Even so."

Mouth dry and nothing more to say, Samir got to his feet, gave a weak nod, and watched as Erik nimbly swung himself through the window and climbed spider-like to the ground below.

Let him have his secrets; if he knew Erik, and he thought he rather did by now, it was only a matter of time before he'd be back.

A nod once more to Darius (and a faint acceleration of his heartbeat), then down the stairs and rejoining the city. Tea, proper tea, to replace the aftertaste of the morning's beverage and conversation. And then, some phone calls.


	9. Risoluto

After he had gone, and taken her breath with him, she was able to remember things that were not him and grew afraid again.

Now she was not frightened of strange men, or of pain, or of loneliness or voices, but rather of the slow death of waiting and waiting and looking over her shoulder. Of the danger the Girys faced just for having taken her in.

It was the ninetieth day, but perhaps she ought to begin counting anew, from the date of the attack. The day he had returned.

She had thrummed with anger and determination only days ago, and where had that gone? She wanted it back; wanted _that_ tightness in her chest rather than that of her fear, because she could tell the difference between them. She wanted the fire of it to direct her actions, and most of all she wanted to act and not react. Enough of that.

She wore the evidence: bruised ribs and scraped knees and lip bitten to bleeding.

The red scarf and her father's violin, perhaps the two most precious objects in the world to her—true, she had never cherished anything as she had them, though comparatively they were worth little—were defiled, destroyed. She would never have them back.

(A quiet place in her mind also wondered, would she ever have anything that was purely her own?)

Morning, afternoon, and night she paced the flat, ghosting from room to room, treading steps and retreading them again. Meg and her mother had left for the Opéra, though they had offered to keep her company—and even this small kindness of theirs sent guilt tearing through her, followed by another wave of shame for realizing how stifling it was to be confined indefinitely to this space.

She could not stay here. There was no question of it, and she did not linger long over the fact but put her mind to more pressing concerns. Where would she go? What would she do?

No one could expect her to withdraw so finally, to share Meg's bed and cramped closet, to never set foot outside again. A temporary arrangement by necessity, and yet it was all she could see when she looked to the future; it left her gasping and that was when she knew it was past time to consider the _next_.

Finally, after darkness had set in and the street lamps had gone on, after she had listened to Meg's news of the opera house, her colourful reenactment of Carlotta's latest attempt to resign, Christine sat down with Madame Giry and told her of the idea that throughout the day had been coalescing in her mind.

"The wardrobe mistress would no doubt register the loss of a wig," she said, "but is there any way you might assemble a disguise for me, to leave the apartment?"

Madame Giry's displeasure was evident. "I know these are unnatural circumstances," she said. "But, my dear, it pains me to see you this way. And I have no right as parent or guardian to refuse you permission."

Christine fumbled inarticulately to find the words to impress upon her hostess the discomfiting ungratefulness that had overtaken her. She owed the Girys her life, and yet their small flat was gradually taking on the qualities of a prison. She could not last much longer in her current state, an enduring moment of crisis, suspended between her past and whatever was meant to come.

The Phantom had left her here, vowing cryptically to make things right. A moment of madness, the latest in a long series of mad moments, that had led her to accept this promise. She could not guess at his intentions—or perhaps she could but simply did not want to—and there was no thinking of his methods, and wasn't it surreal, to trust the man who had betrayed her so intimately?

_He saved your life_ , she told herself, _and asked for nothing_.

Who was he? She was dreadfully tired of this unanswerable question; the nights wasted, awake contemplating the enigma of him, his unimpeachable mystery.

_Who was he?_ This last tangle with him had only teased, left her entirely unsated. So painfully the same, evoking that awful yearning, but yet so new.

"You see, Madame, I must go," she said, "and I want to meet this Samir Ayari." _I want to decide_.

The older woman pursed her lips, and rose to her feet, signalling the end of the conversation. "If you must."

"And, may I use the telephone?" Christine asked.

Madame inclined her head and left the kitchen. Christine crossed the floor and grasped the receiver, steeling herself before dialling the number she would never forget.

_"_ _Say it back to me again," he urged, "one more time just so I'm sure you remember!"_

_"_ _You've only made me repeat it twenty times."_

_He grinned, puckish yet sweet. "I'm afraid you'll forget it when you need it the most."_

_"_ _When will I need it, if I am to live here?"_

_The grin vanished, replaced by a solemn eagerness legible only in his eyes, the curve of his brow. "If you're ever wandering as you do and get lost, or if you get into trouble, or if you're in a shop and it's raining too hard and you need me to send the car."_

_"_ _You're a fool," she replied, but affectionately, and duly repeated the telephone number and when he moved to kiss her, smiled._

The ringing sound, was that the telephone or was it only in her ears? She missed the click of the receiver, missed the rehearsed greeting of the butler on the other end of the line.

"Oh, yes, hello," she mumbled into the grainy silence, some beats too late. "This is Christine. Christine Daaé. Could you possibly—"

"Won't be a moment." The faint sound of the receiver being set down and then quiet, worse than before.

She could not say how long she waited, only that she had succeeded in opening a cut on her lip worrying at it with her nail by the time he picked up the receiver, breathless and hopeful, and god, she could hear the hope in his voice through the telephone, through all the miles and miles and people between them—

"Christine?"

"Raoul," she said, and found that could not stand anymore. She slid to the floor, cradling the receiver, twisting her fingers in the cord. Her eyes itched and burned with new tears.

"Christine," he said, a little reverent, a little disbelieving. "I—I can't believe it. Are you alright?"

"Yes," she said. "No."

He huffed. "Well, which one is it?"

How to explain the turns her life had taken? The emptiness between them had widened, more than in those desolate intervening years before the Opéra. "I've missed you so much," she whispered.

"It's been so long," he said, _ninety days_ and she could imagine that furrow between his brows, had traced it with her finger to make him laugh. "I hadn't heard from you, I—well, I didn't know what to think."

The tears came in earnest now, and she had to bite back a sob, pressed her mouth to her knee to keep it contained. She ought to have expected this, should have known that she would crumble hearing his voice, how it would break open the longing inside her. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, everything's wrong and I've missed you and I don't know what to do, I can't do it alone—"

"Hush, Christine," he soothed. "Sweetheart, it's alright. Tell me where you are: I'll send a car to collect you. I'll drive the damn thing myself."

She wheezed a laugh. "But you hate to drive."

"For you, I'd do anything," he said, so sincerely she almost cried again.

"There is one thing you could do," she said, biting back the familiar acidic taste of guilt. "Do you still rent the flat on the rue de Monceau?"

* * *

 

The outfit Madame had smuggled back from the Opéra could have been, and likely was, a costume from _La Bohème_ , with the cap and the vest and the too-short trousers. She forewent the vest, but the cap was good for hiding her hair, and the trousers had only had to be let down a few inches to fit Christine's short legs.

Madame had also produced a men's jacket, of a much more contemporary style, from her own wardrobe, unveiling a sentimental side of herself that by her shuttered expression was still firmly off-limits.

They had agreed a cab was too risky, and she could not be seen accompanied by either Giry, and the metro was also struck from the list. Too many shadowed places, unpopulated stations. Strangers in suits. That left walking, which came with its own uncertainties, but it was thirty minutes by foot and August in Paris was choked with tourists, insouciant and sunburned.

Still Paris was nothing but danger.

She knew it in the pulse at her throat, the shaking in her fingers, the compulsion to search the crowd for a dead man. Daytime, sky cloud-bare and hot, and still it was as though she was back in the alley, desperate and thinking about death.

That same desperation, that had brought her to begging Madame Giry for a way out. This all felt so covert; it was almost funny to think it could be a plot lifted from a Fleming novel.

And though she did not say it aloud, the tense coil inside of her had eased some at the prospect of going out, knowing of the Phantom's promise— _Rest assured that I will do everything in my power to ensure Christine's safety—_ though there was no sense to it; if Paris was danger, he was surely fatal.

She cut through a bustling flea market, working through a knot of hagglers and agitated vendors. A pragmatic choice, to surround herself with crowds, but by the time she had cleared the market the swell and crush of bodies had her palms clammy with anxiety.

She walked and walked, eyes on the pavement and, when she could not help herself, darting behind her to scan the crowds. Rue Taitbout, and then Saint-Georges, and an apartment building, humble and unobtrusive.

The sixth-floor hallway was done in off-white wallpaper and mahogany paneling, bracketed lights lining the walls and giving off a dull yellow glow. Her shoes squeaked against the linoleum. The door she wanted was on the right, a little down the hall.

She rapped on the door, twice. There was no sound from within, and Christine found she was holding her breath. Who would answer the door? This Samir Ayari… who was she to expect?

A stocky, dark man. Jade eyes, black hair curly and highlighted with steely grey. A pair of thin frames perched on his nose, and she had the strange impression that these, and his earth-toned sweater-vest, were part of a careful artifice, meant to draw attention away from the solidness of him. He seemed a man capable of hiding himself in plain view.

How exactly had he come to be acquainted with the most fantastical and conspicuous of men?

Biting her lip, she reached up and slid the cap from her head, dark hair tumbling heavy down her back.

The man's eyes slid over her, and though he blinked hard in shock he recovered quickly. "Mademoiselle Daaé, I presume."

She smiled, but it came out thinly. "Monsieur Ayari. May I come in?"

"Oh—yes…" he stood aside, closed the door behind her, took her coat. "Tea? Or coffee, perhaps?"

"Tea, thank you."

He nodded and gestured to what appeared to be the parlour, cramped but neat and gently lit by a large window. Vitrines and bookcases lined the walls, a calico-printed sofa and two matching armchairs taking up the bulk of the floorspace. She settled on the edge of an armchair and listened absently to Monsieur Ayari bustling about in the kitchen.

"Your tea, Mademoiselle, how do you take it?" he called.

"Just—just black, please."

There was a faint grunt of acknowledgment. She squinted to make out the titles on a nearby shelf, finding them not to be written in English but in a looping, lyrical script. Arabic?

The clattering of a tray alerted her to Monsieur Ayari's return, and she straightened, accepting her cup and saucer with what she hoped was a less threadbare smile.

He sat opposite her on the sofa, wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his pointed nose, and watched her carefully for a moment.

The silence swelled, and then: "Why did you come here, Christine Daaé?"

Why, indeed. "I suppose… I wanted to thank you, for your agreeing to help me, and as an extension of that I wanted to know exactly what your methods are." And though she had not planned to say it, had not come here today with any thought to asking, she added, "And I want to know more about him. The Phantom."

His mouth twitched and settled. "And you believe me to be in possession of some deeper knowledge of his character?" He did not say this with any sharpness or contempt, but rather, it seemed, simple curiosity.

"Yes," she said. Had she been mistaken? "When we last spoke, he implied a degree of—acquaintanceship, between you."

"Perhaps you ought first to tell me what you know of our mutual friend's past."

"Oh, I… barely knew him, in the end."

His gaze sharpened. "I find that hard to believe. You, who have wrought such a change in him. I am envious: I have known him decades longer than you have and have never managed to make such an impression on him."

She drew her nail along the seamline of her cap, avoiding his eyes. The idea, that she had done something to him, had changed him somehow… but he had promised not to seek her out, and even if she wanted…

She did not. She could not.

Perhaps he noticed her sudden discomfort, for he gave a short cough and changed the subject. "You know, Mademoiselle, it would greatly help our efforts if you did not confuse our agents with disguises," he said wryly.

She flushed. "I apologize, but this—arrangement is so unclear, and… I'm sure you understand I could not stay locked inside forever. I really am grateful."

She was unsure of the expression that clouded Monsieur Ayari's face, but it made him appear more weathered and weary than he had before. "I am only sorry that I can't do more for you," he said quietly. "The truth is, I am retired, and the diversion of too many men, too many resources, it will raise questions. I have stationed men outside your home, and there are documents I can still access, which so far have been of some use, but…" He spread his hands.

She nodded, and wondered why he had been brought into this if there was little he could do anyway.

"I am glad you came to me," he said. "Truth be told, I do not have the faith our mutual friend does in his own abilities." He frowned, then sat forward. "You would be wise to hire a private investigator; they are better equipped for this sort of situation. I have been out of the game for some time, but I am sure there are a few men still in this city whom I can contact."

He rose abruptly, and went to a bookcase, and pulled out a few volumes seemingly at random, flipping through the pages and hastily reshelving them when he appeared not to find the information he sought. Vigorously shaking another book, he caught at a scrap of paper that had fluttered out, with a muttered "Aha."

He resumed his seat, and said, "If you are amenable, I will try the names on this list."

"Monsieur, you are kind, but—"

"Please," he interrupted, "if there is anything I can do for you, you must let me do it." A wry grin, crinkling his eyes, and: "Erik would never let me live if he discovered I had not exhausted all avenues."

"I'm sorry," she said, "but—who?"

The crinkles returned, now accompanied by a frown. "I don't understand. He—did he never give you his name?"

" _Who_?" she said, but from the look he had and the requisite churning in her stomach, she hardly needed his confirmation.

"Well… the Opera Ghost, as you knew him. The Phantom."

Perhaps because she had anticipated the answer, perhaps because the conversation must inevitably return to him, invisible but ever present; perhaps because she had so recently seen him and used up all her fear of him then, but the mention of his former titles now only drew an aching tug from her chest. Still the yearning, and she curled her hands into fists against it.

_Erik._

Her reflection was curtailed when Monsieur Ayari gave a bark of laughter. "How theatrical, that name," he said. He sounded as far away as she felt. "Though he was always one for dramatic appellations."

There was a history there, she knew; if she pressed him enough would he share it with her?

"Who was he, before the Opera Ghost?" she asked.

"Oh, many things," he said, "many things—and not all of them criminal."

She almost growled at his evasive response. "How did you come to know him?"

His eyes refocused on her. "It is a long story, Mademoiselle, and one that I fear I am not authorized to tell."

"Answer me one question, then," she said, thinking wildly.

Slowly he nodded.

"Can he be good?" she asked.

She did not like the softness of his eyes, the pity there. But she was glad for the long moment he took to consider her question, as it made her more inclined to believe him. "He has not been a man long enough for me to know," he replied. "But, I think…"—and for the duration of this in-between moment the whole world hung on the edge of a precipice—"yes."

There was nothing she could think to say in response, and belatedly she lifted her cup to her lips: the tea had gone cold. Monsieur Ayari was gazing out the window.

"Tell me," he said suddenly, "why it is that you are so curious about this man."

She hardly needed to think before the words began to tumble out with abandon, more candid than was comfortable. "He took everything from me, but he gave me so much," she said. "The music… I had lost it, after my father died. He brought the music back to me. But I can't—I can't forgive him the rest. Perhaps ever."

"I understand," he said gently. "I, more than anyone."

He held her gaze, but it prickled and her eyes dropped to the porcelain in her hands.

"Your tea," he said. "It must be cold by now." He stood, bending to gather up the tray.

The absence of the tea tray revealed yesterday's newspaper, open to the culture pages, upon which was printed a black-and-white advertisement for a gala celebrating the installation of the Chagall frescoes at the Palais Garner.

It was only then that she noticed it, then that things slotted together in the back of her mind and told her what to do.

"She screamed herself hoarse," Meg had said yesterday, cackling, "because Reyer dismissed her interpretation, and she threatened to pull out of the gala in September—"

"Please," Christine said, standing so quickly her vision trembled for a moment, "I must get to the opera house—"

His eyebrows rose, and he set the tray down. "What is the matter?"

"I can't explain—thank you for the tea, you have been so kind—"

She did not catch up to herself until she was out the door and striding down the rue Saint-Georges, jacket tucked under her arm and hair tucked haphazardly into her cap. Had she said goodbye to Monsieur Ayari, or simply walked out?

Terror, lining her lungs. Why was terror always so immediate, constricting, she wondered? Courage a flickering flame in the wind; she caught at it, possessed it for a moment, but it burned her. Then gone.

She could not shake the idea that the only way to get it back was to confront the terror and bare her teeth and scare it into submission. She would keep some, to bolster the courage, and would cast the rest of the ichor away. Excise it and grow herself back into the pieces it had eaten up.

This was the first step. The idea, or revelation, whatever it was—to seek her emancipation through the very thing that had become anathema to her—was fragile and fluttering, and did not like to be too closely considered. It flitted through her mind and touched down here and there but never settled, gossamer-winged and tantalizing in its lambent ephemerality.

So caught in chasing the thought was she that some unknowing minutes ago she had come to stand on the Avenue de l'Opéra, the Palais Garnier crowding her sight and rendering trivial the intervening tangle of Parisians and tourists and cars and bicycles, shops and benches and electrical wires.

The clouds moved off the sun, and for the briefest of moments the opera house was transformed in a burst of gilded bronze and marble divine and seraphic.

It felt inevitable in the way only a building could feel like destiny.

She was convinced now that this insane scheme was meant to be seen through, to whatever end.

Later, she would barely remember walking down the avenue, every step gaining on the opera house, tall and leviathan. She would not remember where she entered the building, or if she met anyone on the way, or if she spoke to them.

What was it animating her feet and body, drawing her to the Managers' office? A shrill sound pierced her ears, and she came to realize it was not in her head but coming from inside the room.

The sound resolved into a voice: "Enough, it is enough, I will not be having it! I will not bear such insults!"

Carlotta.

It was perfect, really. Timed perfectly. The soothing balm of a moment fated.

"Don't worry, monsieurs," Carlotta cried, "I will not be burdening you any longer! You can find another diva to command."

Something, someone else, reaching out and pushing open the door and stepping inside. Speaking in her voice, shocking herself and the occupants of the office:

"I will sing it."

 


End file.
